UP STREAM 

AN AMERICAN CHRONICLE 



U P S T REAM 



BY 
LUDWIG LEWISOHN 



^ 



HON! AND LJVERIGHT 

PrjjiUSiiF.KS : New York 



P555a3 



UP STREAM 



AN AMERICAN CHRONICLE 



Copyright, 1922, by 

BONI & LlVERIGHT, INC. 



Printed in the United States of America 



X 



§)0!.A6591O6 

MAfl 13 72 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTEB 

Prologue . . 

I. A Far Childhood .... 

II. The American Scene 

III. The Making of an American 

IV. The Making of an Anglo-American 
V. The American Discovers Exile 

VI. The American Finds Refuge 

VII. The Business of Education 

VIII. The Color of Life 

IX. Myth and Blood . 

X. The World in Chaos 

Epilogue . . . . . 



PAGE 

9 
11 
34 

56 
80 
104 
127 
151 
177 
198 
220 
247 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/upstreamamericanOOIewi 



PKOLOGUE 

The world is full of stories and many of the stories 
are true. But they are not true enough. An artistic 
pattern comes between the teller of the tale and his 
reality, or a vague fear of stupid and malicious com- 
ment or — especially in America — a desire to avoid 
singularity. Yet, somehow, we must master life or it 
will end by destroying us. We can master it only by 
understanding it and we can understand it only by tell- 
ing each other the quite naked and, if need be, the de- 
vastating truth. 

Some such perception and some such motive is in 
the consciousness of every serious novelist and in that 
of every thinker. But the novelist sacrifices to a form 
and the thinker to a system. Each has had an anterior 
vision into which he lets his facts and even his emo- 
tions melt. And this anterior vision — of a fable in the 
one case, of a logical structure in the other — is nothing 
but a mask. For both the novelist and the philosopher 
is only an autobiographer in disguise. Each writes a 
confession; each is a lyricist at bottom. I, too, could 
easily have written a novel or a treatise. I have chosen 
to drop the mask. 

It is not a simple thing to do. One likes to be decor- 
ous. The folds of this mantle of civilization we wear 
in public, and often enough, in private, are graceful 
and accustomed. They give a dignity to the figure 
that the mind may lack. But if no one will ever speak 
out for fear of wounding his own susceptibilities or 

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those of others, this hush of cowardly considerateiiess 
and moral stealth in which so much of our life is 
passed will either throttle us some day or sting us into 
raw and mad revolt. 

In every other country men have spoken out in 
prose or verse and have recorded their experience and 
their vision and their judgment on this civilization in 
which we are ensnared. But no one has spoken out in 
America. We have not suffered enough, and man is a 
timid and a patient creature from whom nothing less 
than the unendurable itself will wring a protest. 
There are thousands of people among us who can find 
in my adventures a living symbol of theirs and in my 
conclusion a liberation of their own and in whom, as in 
me, this moment of history has burned away delusions 
to the last shred. But how many will admit that and not 
rather yield to the insidious fear of those to whom they 
owe deference or money or a social position in Gopher 
Prairie or Central City? It is a nice question which 
must be settled in each conscience. I have done my 
share. 



[10] 



CHAPTER I 

A FAR CHILDHOOD 



The city ;that I remember, the Berlin of the 
eighties, was rugged and grey. But it had nothing 
forbidding in its aspect, rather an air of homely and 
familiar comfort. There were few private houses, but 
people lived in their apartments in large, airy rooms 
with tall French windows and neat, white tile ovens. 
; The streets were monotonous in appearance but ad- 
mirably clean. There were no posters, no public ad- 
vertisements except upon the pillars erected for that 
purpose, the traffic of horse-cars, omnibuses and cabs 
was orderly and convenient. The cabs, driven by red- 
faced, loquacious cabbies in blue-caped coats and top- 
hats, were cheap. My father and mother, though far 
from rich, used them constantly, and I remember be- 
ing driven for hours through the black-draped city on 
that icy day in 1888 on which the old emperor's body 
lay in state in the cathedral. 

My earliest glimpses of beauty are characteristic 
of the city. One was the windows of the Royal Porce- 
lain Works on the Leipziger Strasse. With all the 
exquisite sensitiveness of childhood I saw those won- 
derful little figures and their porcelain veils and 
draperies and delicately moulded forms. They were 
so tiny and yet so perfect, and they thrilled me far 
more than Rauch's equestrian statue of the great 
Frederic or the chariot of victory over the city gate. 

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The latter were dutifully impressed upon me by my 
father ; my mother let me stand and gaze my fill before 
the windows of the porcelain shop . . . But the great 
sight to me, which I never saw without a lifting of the 
heart, was a certain public square. One walked or 
drove through a short street in which, villas stood in 
gardens; at the end of that street one came upon the 
square quite suddenly. To that moment I always looked 
forward ; the sensation was like the sudden crash of an 
orchestra. For the square spread out with an airiness, 
a fine and noble amplitude of shape and proportion, a 
grace and majesty at once that I despair of rendering 
into words. I have seen nothing like it since. Perhaps 
it seemed finer to my childish eyes than it was or is; 
but I am willing to yield to that old vision as a true 
one, since the seat of beauty is after all in the behold- 
ing mind . . ♦ 

Beyond the square lay the Tiergarten. Thither I 
was taken on many pleasant afternoons. And I can 
still see very clearly the statue of Flora surrounded by 
gorgeous flower-beds and the monument to Queen 
Louise and the "snail hill" swarming with other chil- 
' dren and their nurse-maids ; I can still hear their 
merry cries ; I can still feel the stinging coolness on my 
heated throat of the milk sold at the famous kiosks of 
Bolle. But when I was four or five years old I would 
beg my nurse to take me to the gold-fish pond. It was 
generally still by the little artificial lake and I loved 
the stillness ; the dark green f oilage was very thick all 
around and the dusk fell early there. The mute dart- 
ing about of the fishes seemed mysterious and soothing, 
the stone benches were cool and strong and bare. I 
felt in this spot without knowing it, the majesty of 

[12] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

places withdrawn from the cries of men . . . Another 
scene of the great park I remember : a winter scene. 
Bare trees and the frozen river around the Rousseau 
Island and the gay scarfs of the skaters. And sud- 
denly dusk and a brazen sun-disc black-barred by 
trees. Then the swift early winter night and the gas- 
lamps of the streets and the warmth and security of 
home . . . 

But the out-of-door scenes of winter that I recall 
are few: another square and the snow-flakes falling 
thick and my father and I walking across it to a Vienna 
cafe where he played chess on Sunday mornings. This 
is one scene. And another is our sturdy maid carry- 
ing me from a playmate's house to a cab through a 
blinding blizzard. And the third is the Christmas fair 
— long since abolished — -on the Bell-Alliance Square. 
Twinkling lights in the frosty air, and booths noisy 
and gay with cheap toys and cakes, and everywhere 
the sharp odor of the fir-trees. 

I loved spring more than even this — the cool, vir- 
ginal, gradual spring of the North. The windows 
were opened and children reappeared on the streets 
and great boughs of lilacs were sold. Have the Ger- 
man lilacs a headier and sweeter fragrance than ours ? 
It seemed to fill the air and the heart; it meant the 
winds of spring and people sitting in gardens and cast- 
ing aside their cares. For the Germans, I can recog- 
nise now, yield to the natural moods of the seasons. 
Spring is to them still the spring of the folk-songs and 
they would like to pack a bundle and wander out into 
the land with lilac blossoms in their hats . . . My father 
and mother took a cab on Sunday and drove in the 
Tiergarten or else went by boat up the river Spree to 

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Treptow and there we sat on pleasant terraces and 
watched the life on the water. Even then I loved to 
see men and youths in their skiffs with bare white arms 
and legs and paddles flashing in the sunlight and took 
a deep delight in the strong, silent, virile rhythm of the 
rise and fall of their oars. And my father gave me a 
cylindrical box of tin and taught me to recognize and 
gather a few of the commoner herbs and grasses. Or 
tried, rather, for even at five my mind was impervious 
to the facts of science and soon I carried sandwiches 
in my "botanising drum." 

In the summer of my sixth year my father rented a 
house by a lake in Straussberg near Berlin. The vil- 
lage was still isolated. You took the train and then a 
stage-coach to reach it. There were swans on the lake 
and a boat, sheep in the meadows and goose-berry 
bushes in the garden. Over all a deep, brooding, old- 
world peace. My father employed weavers in the vil- 
lage and I saw them in their houses at the hand- 
looms. It was a city-child's first taste of country life. 
And the crow of a cock across the fields or the bleat of 
a sheep still brings to me a vision of the Brandenburg 
country-side. When we returned to Berlin I entered 
school and life became a grave and ordered matter. 

n 

Our home was a flat of seven rooms furnished with 
more solidity than grace. Beds, tables and chairs 
were of massive walnut and of a design so old-fash- 
ioned that I see it returning into favor. All these 
things had not been bought in shops. According to a 
sound, old custom even then, I suppose, on the wane, 
they had been made to order by a small master cabinet- 

[14] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

maker. Here lived my father, my mother, my maternal 
grandmother and I. Nor must I forget the faithful, 
kindly Kathe who was with us and served us until that 
home was broken up. 

in 

My people were Jews of unmixed blood and descent 
who had evidently lived for generations in the North 
and IMorth East of Germany. I have before me now a 
picture of my grandfather taken in the sixties. Despite 
the fact that he performed rabbinical functions to scat- 
tered congregations in East Prussia, I observe that in 
contravention of the law, his face is clean-shaven and 
that he has no ear-locks; he is clad in the Western 
European fashion of his day. He was a large man with 
a liberal forehead, a humorous mouth and kindly eyes. 
From old, half -forgotten anecdotes I glean something 
of this character. He had much rabinnical learning, 
but a whimsical contempt for the ritual law; his 
familiar friends were the Protestant Pastor and the 
schoolmaster of the village ; he was of frugal habits but 
of something dangerously like incompetence in worldly 
tEihgsI The power and intensity of the family belonged 
to my grandmother, who was much his junior and who 
survived him for over twenty years. It was she who 
had run the primitive little factory that turned cotton 
into wadding for the greatcoats needed in the severe 
winters on the Eussian frontier; it was she who had 
toiled early and late that her sons might have an 
academic education. They were grateful to her and 
provided for her in her old age with a fine generosity. 
Of intimate tenderness to her they felt but little. She 
was a tall woman and a dour. She had strong prac- 

[15] 



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tical sense but a tyrannical and gloomy temper. To 
me she melted, the only child of her youngest and 
of her only girl, and the memory touches me of her sit- 
ting on the green rep sofa, glasses on nose, and read- 
ing aloud to me the German fairy tales of which I 
never tired. 

My father and mother were first cousins. Their 
racial and social origin was the same. So that I need 
not dwell on my paternal grand-parents of whom I 
know but little. The mother (my grandmother's sis- 
ter) had died early. My grandfather had started out 
in life as a tanner, but had succeeded neither at his 
trade nor at anything else. I remember him well, for 
he was our guest on every Sunday. His white mous- 
tache and Vandyke beard gave him an air of false dis- 
tinction, for his intelligence was limited and his man- 
ners clumsy. My mother treated him with gentleness, 
my father with a distant kindness. For my grand- 
father, being poor, had turned over his oldest child at 
the age of five to childless but wealthy, relatives and 
this uncle and aunt had been, in the deeper sense, the 
only parents whom my father had ever known. From 
them, too, came the moderate but real prosperity that 
we enjoyed. 

Other forms and faces are much clearer in my 
memory — a large circle of uncles and aunts and cousins, 
all acting with a special tenderness to me as the young- 
est child in the group. And chiefly I recall my mother 's 
oldest and favorite brother. He was a man in the 
forties when I knew him, very tall and very stout. He 
was his mother's son. But her imperiousness and 
moroseness had been tempered in him by a fine and 
trained intelligence and by contact with men and with 

[16] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

notable affairs. He had passed through the gymnasium 
at Insterburg and then studied law at Konigsberg. 
Thrice he had fought for his country, in 1864, 1866 and 
1870, and from the campaign in France he had re- 
turned with the iron cross. He had abandoned the law 
and occupied a distinguished position on the staff of a 
well-known Berlin newspaper. Punctilious and exact- 
ing and a tireless worker, he showed the kindlier ele- 
ments of his nature in a wide hospitality and for many 
years his house in Berlin was the gathering place of 
the younger graduates of his Burschenschaft and his 
university. The letters which he wrote to my mother 
in America in the course of two decades I am glad to 
possess. The style is clear and expressive with a touch 
of austerity, the contents unaffectedly high-minded, 
melancholy (the badge of all our tribe) and warm- 
hearted. 

This uncle had married a Gentile woman and for 
years the marriage was a stormy one. But his daugh- 
ter, a fair, engaging girl somewhat older than I, was 
the companion and playmate of my earliest years, and 
the relations between my aunt and her Jewish kin were 
cordial and unclouded. 

In truth, all the members of my family seemed to 
feel that they were Germans first and Jews afterwards. 
They were not disloyal to their race nor did they seek 
to hide it. Although they all spoke unexceptional 
High German they used many Hebrew expressions 
both among themselves and before their Gentile 
friends. But they had assimilated, in a deep sense, 
Aryan ways of thought and feeling. Their books, their 
music, their political interests were all German. I 
remember but one phrase disparaging to their Christ- 

[17] 



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ian countrymen. It was a curious one : * ' What can one 
expect? The Gentile has no heart !' ' 

Two scenes stand before me which symbolise the 
character of the social group from which I sprang. 
This is one : I am sitting in a half-darkened room and 
my heart beats and my cheeks burn. It is Christmas 
Eve. I look out through the dark pane and across the 
street. Ah, there, behind an uncurtained window, a 
tree with candles. Quickly I turn my eyes away. I 
do not want to taste the glory until it is truly mine. 
And at last, at last, a bell rings. The folding doors 
open and there — in the drawing room — stands my own 
tree in its glimmering splendor and around it the gifts 
from my parents and my grandmother and my uncles 
and aunts — charming German toys and books of fairy- 
tales and marchpane from Konigsberg. And my mother 
takes me by the hand and leads me to the table and I 
feel as though I were myself walking straight into a 
fairytale . . . 

And the other scene : It was my grandmother 's cus- 
tom, in pious remembrance of her husband, to visit the 
temple on the chief Jewish holidays — New Year and 
the Day of Atonement. And once, on the day of the 
great white fast, I was taken there to see her. The 
temple was large and rather splendid ; the great seven- 
branched candelabra were of shining silver. The rabbi, 
the cantor and the large congregation of men were all 
clad in their gleaming shrouds and their white, silken 
praying shawls and had white caps on their heads. I 
can still see one venerable old man who read his He- 
brew book through a large magnifying glass. The 
whiteness of the penitential scene was wonderful and 
solemn. Then the first star came out and the great day 

[18] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

was over and in the vestibule I saw my grandmother 
being reverently saluted by her sons who wished her 
a happy holiday. 

Two scenes. But the first was native and familiar 
to the heart of the child that I was : the second a little 
weird and terrifying and alien. 



m 



My father 's foster-father was a man of some educa- 
tion and reading. Also an astute man who despite his 
severe lameness conducted a successful importing 
business from his armchair. His wife was a warm- 
hearted woman, but incurably erratic and had ended 
in hopeless madness when my father was a youth. It 
is clear that the adopted child received great kindness, 
was treated with indulgence or overindulgence, but 
never received any rational guidance. He was taken to 
France and Switzerland before he was fifteen, his 
ample allowance permitted him to satisfy his tastes in 
books and music and amateur scientific experimenta- 
tion. But neither his mind nor his character under- 
went any discipline. Thus he grew up generous but 
wasteful. The bitter experience of later years cor- 
rected that fault. It could not correct his over- 
eagerness, his lack of intellectual restraint, his habit 
of Utopian scheming, or the harsh self-assertiveness 
by which he strove to deaden his own sense of failure 
and insignificance. But neither could it impair his 
beautiful unselfishness and courage or his tireless de- 
votion to the things of the mind. In later years I 
often found myself at variance with him in matters of 
opinion and belief; yet in face of his unfaltering de- 

[19] 



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votion I was always consoled by the thought that I 
have scarcely a sound interest in literature or philoso- 
phy the impulse toward which had not come to me 
from his teaching and from his example . . . 

He completed the course of the Royal Realschule 
at nineteen. He was too uncertain of himself to in- 
sist on prolonging his studies at the university; he 
already loved my mother and so he entered a well- 
known house of woolen manufacturers. By this time 
his foster-mother was hopelessly insane and his fos- 
ter-father had fallen under the influence of an inferior 
woman. He had no real home. And so his request to 
be set up in business and to marry was readily granted. 
At twenty-three he was a father. 

I often reflect upon his tragic youth. He was only 
a boy, crude, passionate, impulsive. He disliked his 
business but dared not slight it. Upon him were the 
eyes of my grandmother and of my mother's brothers. 
Their scrutiny, I am afraid, was more severe than 
sympathetic. The society in which he lived placed 
great stress on dignity and seemliness of demeanor. 
And so he tried hard to play the man and the man of 
business. That, under these circumstances, he escaped 
obvious disaster for eight years bears witness to his 
feeling of duty and his endurance. 

My earliest recollections of him are all of his hours 
of escape from drudgery and care. He would sit in the 
mellow gas-light of our sitting-room and read far into 
the night. Or I would wake up and see him in the ad- 
joining room, reading in bed by candle-light. And on 
cold or rainy Sundays and holidays he would spend 
hours and hours at the piano. He played most imper- 
fectly at best, but he read his scores accurately and 

[20] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

with fine musical intelligence and his halting technique 
did not prevent him from hearing all the grace and 
charm of Mozart, all the loftiness and solemn sweet- 
ness of Beethoven . . . 

My mother did not come to Berlin until her father 
died. She was then only twelve years old. But a 
deep and tenacious loyalty attached her to the bleak 
East Prussian village of her childhood, and for years 
she was never weary of telling, nor I of hearing, stories 
of those early days. Thus I know how the intense, 
dark-eyed little girl with the very red cheeks of a 
northern climate hastened, wrapped in a heavy shawl, 
through the snowy dusk to afternoon school, clutching 
a candle with which to light her form. Or how, on 
other days, she went eagerly to the house of a super- 
annuated spinster who had been a governess in gen- 
tlemen's families to learn French and crocheting and 
tatting. She brought from that old home, moreover, 
a fine heritage of folk-songs and tales and sayings. 
Much that I learned from her lips as early as I learned 
anything I have found since in the collections of f olk- 
lorists and students of popular poetry and song. She 
was all her life, despite her Jewishness, her wide and 
sad experience and her artistic tastes, a spiritual child 
of the German folk. A hundred times, when her hair 
was white and her heart worn with sorrow and disap- 
pointment, I have seen in her eyes, in her whole self 
arise suddenly a ghostly but sweet shadow of the 
sturdy East-Prussian lass — simple and deep-hearted 
and of the very soul of her homeland. 

Her education in Berlin was old-fashioned and lim- 
ited. It was long before the days of the gymnasium 
for girls. Yet within its narrow range the Hohere 

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Tochterschule had thoroughness. My mother's knowl- 
edge of French, at least, was sound and extensive. 
Her chief interest, however, in those days, was music. 
Her alto voice was well cultivated. When I awoke 
to the consciousness of art I found that I knew — and. 
could remember no time at which I had not known — 
the words and music of practically all the great songs 
of Schubert and Schumann, of Franz and Mendelssohn 
and Brahms. So often, during my childhood, had I 
heard them from her lips. 

Her girlhood was not happy. The social environ- 
ment was cruelly rigid ; one breathed according to law. 
She wanted to enter a seminary for teachers; she 
begged to be allowed to learn book-keeping. But since 
there was no need, her brothers decided that it was 
unseemly for a young woman to work outside of the 
home. When the dusk stole into the small Berlin flat 
and she was weary of music and embroidery, she would 
go out in all weathers and hurry through the streets 
and let the rain beat upon her face — intensely troubled, 
rebellious against the forces that held her. Yet she 
was quite helpless. For her strength never lay in 
nimbleness of mind ; neither then nor later did she re- 
flect closely; it lay in the fullness and richness of her 
emotional nature. But she had been carefully taught 
to distrust her impulses. She wrote verses and dared 
not show them. Even so she was considered uncon- 
ventional and shrank more and more within herself. 
She entertained a deep affection for a young pianist 
through whom she caught glimpses of a freer life. But 
he was hopelessly poor and drifted away. She re- 
ceived the most intelligent sympathy, after all, from 
her young cousin, my father. They read the same 

[22] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

books, loved the same music, nursed their enthusiasm 
on the same plays. He was reputed, moreover, to be 
the heir of a very large fortune. Neither knew that 
his foster-father, as a matter of fact, had lost many 
thousands in the financial collapse that followed the 
inflation of the early; seventies. And she thought, 
quite rightly, that money means liberty in the higher 
and finer as well as in the coarser and more obvious 
sense. 

Once married, however, my father's crudeness and 
violence wore on her; a moroseness in him which was 
the result of the harsh pressure which he endured and 
would not admit, estranged her. Again she was baffled 
and solitary. Then her child was born. The tension 
snapped. Into the channel of her maternal love she 
poured all her passionate ideality, all her deep yearn- 
ing, all her half -inarticulate ambitions, all the splen- 
dor of her frustrate hopes. In the wild and tragic 
munificence of her love she kept nothing for herself. 
Utterly she transferred the centre of her being to 
another. It was wrong ! Wrong to herself. The world 
is wide and its paths are many and the fate of no man 
is quite his own to shape. So that through my fail- 
ures and misfortunes and enforced wanderings her 
life was again beggared and often darkened. I loved 
her and I mourn her with all my strength. Yet to her 
great love I was — as any man would have been — but 
an unprofitable servant. 

17 

My life until I went to school was an intense wak- 
ing dream. The pretty toys I had interested me but 

[23] 



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little. I shrank from playmates not through timidity 
but because they interrupted my imaginings. Their 
amusements seemed aimless and their noise made me 
feel sick and faint. Yet I was by no means a delicate 
child; I was sturdy and broad-chested and passed 
vigorously through two rather severe illnesses that 
attacked me early. But just as the taste of certain 
dainties that I liked gave me a pleasure that was almost 
too keen, so disagreeable sense-impressions made me 
dizzy and, on at least one occasion, violently ill. An 
old aunt had died and my mother took me with her on 
a visit of condolence. The room was full of black- 
garbed women ; there was a faint stale odor of flowers 
and a continuous buzz of conversation. It all seemed 
hideous to me; I fainted and had to be carried home. 
The only child whom I admitted to full intimacy was 
my fair-haired cousin. She was musical, her voice 
was soft, her ways with me were gentle. I loved to 
touch the fine texture of her skin and the silkiness of 
her long hair. Curiously enough I cannot remember 
how, in those earliest years, we entertained each 
other. I recall with the utmost vividness that I 
thought her lovely, and that the sight of her touched 
me like the lilacs of spring or the sound of singing . . . 
Most of my waking dreams have vanished from my 
mind. But two I entertained so constantly and so long 
that I remember them as though they had been reali- 
ties. I imagined a great garden in an endless summer. 
In it were gathered under cool groves the few people 
whom I loved. There were tables under the trees 
laden with things to eat — roast duck and Baumkuchen 
and clusters of large, cool, translucent grapes. A 
Never-Never land. The other dream was more boyish. 

[24] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

I saw myself, clad in green huntman's garb, a cock's 
feather in my hat, riding swiftly on a small, lithe 
horse. Whither or why? I don't know. That vision 
of myself was enough and was a source of endless 
delight. 

When I was four years old I was sent to a Kinder- 
garten. But I was so obviously unhappy and listless 
that the principal asked my mother to keep me at 
home. Then my grandmother taught me my letters 
and my real life began. My first two books were col- 
lections of stories written for little children and I 
thought them delightful. But someone brought me a 
small, greenish volume bound in boards. It was called 
Bechstein's Marchen. Faded and tattered the little 
book lies before me as I write. I turn the pages — to 
this day I know them almost by heart — I look at the 
small, stiff, quaint, inimitably haunting wood-cuts. . . . 
Immemorial romance, sombre and magical world of 
dim forests and mediaeval cities and doomed kings, 
of shepherds and gnomes, full of old racial memories, 
free as the imagination of childhood, deep as the heart 
of man ! The style, I see now, was worthy of the mat- 
ter — concrete, marrowy, quaint as the wood-cuts with 
flashes now and then, of a wild, grotesque humor . . . 
For the first time in my life I became insistent, begging 
for books and more books. Thus I read Grimm and 
Andersen for myself now and the Arabian Nights and 
a large and precious volume called Al-Runa in which 
were gathered fairy-tales of all peoples — German and 
English and Norse, Romaic and Russian and the weird 
and cruel legends of the Southern Slavs. I read until 
my eyes ached and my forehead was fevered. If my 
mother bade me go and play in the open I lay on the 

[25] 



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door-step without and wept in a passion of despair. 
No wonder! I have lived with books and loved the 
best things in more than one literature. Yet what has 
the highest delight of later years been to that pure and 
passionate joy, that ecstasy of absorption in which I 
became one with the things I read and saw with my 
own eyes castles by the shores of Norseland, dragons 
on the banks of lustrous rivers and with my own ears 
heard the blowing of the horns of Elfland. . . . 

My condition was, of course, an unhealthy one, and 
my mother dealt with it energetically. On four after- 
noons a week I was sent to the Tiergarten in charge 
of a young Kindergartnerin, on other afternoons my 
mother took long walks with me, a habit which we con- 
tinued for many years. I said that she dealt with this 
matter energetically. But not with this alone. Her 
love was no ignoble indulgence. It held no element of 
moral sloth. My diet was determined by the family 
physician, not by my liking. For every time I tasted 
sweets or pastry, an American child of to-day tastes 
them a hundred times. I slept on a pillow of horse- 
hair; I used not the traditional feather-bed but the 
hardier blanket. ... It never occurred to me that I 
could fail to obey my father and mother ; it never oc- 
curred to my cousin and the other children whom we 
knew that they could fail to obey theirs. Thus be- 
tween parents and young children the relations were 
far more dignified and becoming, far more fruitful of 
a fine piety than any I have seen since. There may 
have been an occasional injustice. "We are all human. 
There was no noise, no wrangling, no vulgar antagon- 
ism. . . . After the care of my body, my mother's love 
took the form of an intense and glowing ambition for 

[26] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

me. I was to realize my highest possibilities, to de- 
velop every faculty, to attain every ability and grace 
that mark the complete man. I learned skating in 
winter and swimming in summer, always under com- 
petent instruction. I was taught music and gymnas- 
tics. I have heard mothers complain with a cer- 
tain wistfulness that it was time for their children to 
go to school. I have seen them put off the evil day. 
My mother with her German ideals felt altogether dif- 
ferently. With almost an austerity of joy she wel- 
comed the autumn of my sixth year. The great process 
of development was now to begin in earnest. The day 
was a solemn day for her. Consciously she now dedi- 
cated herself to a double watchfulness, helpfulness and 
devotion during the momentous years that were to 
come. 



The society into which I was born, whatever were 
its virtues or its faults, had one notable quality: it 
knew what it wanted. A few aims and their implied 
values were fixed. The kind of school I was to attend 
was never debated. It was an absolutely foregone con- 
clusion that a liberal education was the necessary foun- 
dation of right and noble living. My parents were 
of modest origin and of modest means. But if anyone 
had questioned my being prepared for the gymnasium 
and proceeding from thence to the university, they 
would have held it a prophecy of my early death. My 
uncles entertained the same feeling concerning their 
sons, and among the painful memories of my childhood 
is the gray, tragic face of one of them whose boy had 
that day failed to pass his Reifeprufung. So deeply 

[27] 



UP STREAM 

did this conviction, which was considered beyond dis- 
cussion, sink into my consciousness that, to this day, 
the debate concerning the value of a higher education 
so often heard among us in America, has no more 
real content for me than a debate concerning the value 
of bread. . . . 

The gymnasium which admitted me to its Vorschule 
was housed in an ancient building, four stories high, 
constructed of heavy and rather gloomy stones. I do 
not know where it was. I know that on my way to 
school I passed one house that was almost hidden by 
roses in the spring, and that I passed a handsome new 
church $iat stood ,in a small, green square., The 
wooden stairs of the gaunt, old schoolhouse were 
deeply worn by the steps of generations of boys and 
youths, the yard was bleak and paven, the rooms light 
but barren of any adornment; the forms were dark- 
brown with splashes of ink. 

During the first week at school I learned to know 
loneliness and homesickness and began to develop, 
too, a certain quiet stoicism which staid with me for 
many years and did me measureless harm. The 
teacher, a lank, kindly man with a long, blond beard, 
left the room for a little. He found it in uproar when 
he returned. I had been quiet. But I, too, felt the 
smarting taps of his cane across my shoulders. I did 
not cry and I did not tell my mother until years later. 
It was the only punishment I received at the school 
during the two years of my attendance. Soon this 
very teacher singled me out with much kindness, vis- 
ited our home when I was ill with a heavy cold and 
commended me to the teacher who followed him. By 
this time too, I had made friends of several of my little 

[28] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

fellow-pupils and the first wretched feeling of forlor- 
ness had worn off. 

The instruction was simple in its subject-matter: 
reading, writing, arithmetic, singing, gymnastics and 
i ' religion. ' ' I know now that it was remarkably thor- 
ough. I am hopelessly stupid at figures. For six 
weary years at high school and college I dragged my 
numb mind through five or, at the best, three periods 
of mathematical instruction a week. I could not tell 
now, literally to save my life, the nature of a quad- 
ratic equation. But I know the elementary arithmetic 
learned in that German school. I don't need to multi- 
ply simple figures, for instance. I know the answers 
instinctively and at once. . . . The hour I liked best 
was that known as "religion" As a Jew I could easily 
have been excused from attending. But my parents 
had no prejudices in this respect. And they were right. 
For there was no hint of dogma, not even of moraliz- 
ing. The teacher simply related to us the Old Testa- 
ment legends in chronological order, and to me it 
seemed as though I heard a new and fascinating set of 
fairy-tales. I had a vision of the tower of Babel pierc- 
ing a tropic sky, of long lines of camels under solemn 
stars, of tall, dark maidens carrying pitchers to ancient 
wells by the tents of Jacob. ... 

The home-work was harder. My mother's intense 
ambition for me made her severe. She bought a desk 
for me which stood, as did its chair, on a little wooden 
platform several feet in height. While I sat at this desk 
she could, small as I was, stand beside me. And so we 
worked together until my tasks were perfectly done — 
until I had written my copy-book page and could recite 
my verses without hesitation. These tasks, I think, 

[29] 



UP STREAM 

grew longer than was quite wise during my second 
year at school. I shed some childish tears of weari- 
ness, I know, and my mother grew a little anxious 
over my lack of zeal. 

But life was not all work. There was the magic 
of Christmas and Easter with generous vacations; 
there was the delight of spring with flower-girls on the 
curb. I had an allowance of one mark a week now and 
spent most of it on posies for my mother and my 
blond cousin. Above all, in winter there was an occa- 
sional visit to a theatrical performance of some fairy 
play — a pleasure almost too rich and keen to be quite 
free from pain. Also there were children's parties. 
But I cared less for these than for a quiet afternoon 
with one of my fellows at school — a little lad of almost 
girlish delicacy and of my own tastes. And there 
were long walks with my mother, and skating in win- 
ter with my cousin and summer outings. ... A rich 
and happy childhood. Even my grandmother's death 
darkened it only for a week or two. Nor, in my child- 
ish preoccupations, did I hear the mutterings that pre- 
ceeded the final crash of our prosperity and our hopes. 

Years afterwards I learned, of course, all the dis- 
heartening details of my father's financial ruin. They 
would make but a dull story. Late in the year 1889 
his foster-father died and left him about twenty thou- 
sand dollars, the remnant of a once considerable for- 
tune. With this sum he rashly engaged in an 
undertaking of which he knew nothing — the importa- 
tion of Italian fruits. He paid an exorbitant sum 

[30] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

for the good- will of a worthless firm, for lighters that 
did not exist, for customers that could not be found. 
In three months he was ruined and, overcome by shame 
and despair, fell ill. His illness was not of the body. 
It was a slight attack of melancholia. The psychical 
inhibitions were, of course, paralysing. Yet no one, 
not even his physician, quite understood that fact. 
He was urged to see friends and former associates, 
to seek a position here and there. But it was impos- 
sible for him to face the world. Aimlessly he wan- 
dered about and reported (and probably believed) that 
he had met only coldness and rebuffs. My mother, not 
dreaming that his mind was sick, credited these re- 
ports; they shook her faith in men and increased her 
fundamental self-distrust. Thus in the midst of 
friends and kinsmen who would, in the traditional 
Jewish fashion, have scolded loudly but helped gener- 
ously, my father and mother were isolated, embittered 
and helpless. ... 

A day came which I have never forgotten. My 
father and mother stood in our living room. A shaft 
of September sunshine fell upon them both. My father 
held his hand to his mouth; one of his delusions was 
that his tongue was slightly paralysed; my mother 
turned the pages of a letter. Her eyes rested on him 
in sorrow and perplexity Suddenly she spoke: 
"Would you like to go to America ?" My father drew 
himself up. A strange and almost unnatural relief 
came into his face. "Yes," he gasped. Then he turned 
to me with the first smile he had worn in weeks. 
"Would you like to go to America, to Uncle S.f" 

Long before, the youngest of my mother's four 
brothers had emigrated to America. He was said to 

[31] 



UP STREAM 

have prospered moderately there. The letter was from 
him. The relief which my father had shown was fol- 
lowed by a fever of activity. Though his life had been, 
however rash and foolish, of an unblemished honor, 
he councilled my mother to secrecy. She blamed her- 
self bitterly in later years for having followed his 
council. He was like a man trying to flee from himself. 
Weeks of turmoil followed. I felt keenly the hid- 
den terror and the loud confusion. My father was 
possessed by the morbid notion that he himself would 
have to carry all our luggage. He sold our furniture, 
his excellent library; with difficulty my mother saved 
the silver and linen and my books. ... It was autumn 
and it rained and rained. My mother felt a thousand 
hesitations. Again and again she was on the point of 
speaking out, of appealing to her brothers. Pride and 
self-distrust and my father's sudden, diseased energy 
constrained her. Then, one day, the tickets had been 
bought and, with a very ache of tragic foreboding, 
she faced an accomplished fact. Deep in her heart 
she nursed one bleak consolation. The two thousand 
dollars with which my father intended to start life 
in America were in her keeping. Whatever happened 
she determined to cling to enough for our return pass- 

ci c . . . 

Hamburg! I shall never forget it, though I was 
but a child of eight. A sky of slate, an angry wind, 
ancient streets with tall, gabled mediaeval houses lead- 
ing to a square, the stuffy hotel full of horse-hair cov- 
ered chairs and sofas, the sad-faced man who ex- 
changed German money for American, the broad Elbe 
river and the fog-horns of the tugs and ferries. The 
fog-horns ... I stop writing and listen. Beyond the 

[32] 



A FAR CHILDHOOD 

park, close by the river, the train comes in. Its whis- 
tle blows a hoarse blast. Straightway — it never fails — 
thirty years are swept away, I am in Hamburg again, 
proud of my long great-coat, filled with a strange sense, 
half of expectancy, half of terror, wondering at the 
whiteness of my mother's face and the unspeakable 
wistfulness in her eyes. . . . 

At ten in the forenoon we boarded the ferry that 
was to take us to our ship. It was the old Hamburg- 
American liner Suevia. She carried only first-class 
passengers and steerage. We were among the former. 
The trip took several hours, I believe, but I am not 
sure. Then the great ship received us and to me it 
immediately became a world of wonder. At luncheon 
I marvelled at the array of wine and water glasses 
hanging like cnandeliers above the tables, at the swivel 
chairs fastened to the floor, at the strange sounds on 
the lips of other passengers. "They are speaking 
English,' ' my father said to me. 

Dark fell ; the ship was in motion ; my father paced 
the deck, up and down, up and down. At last a shat- 
tering doubt of this adventure had come into his mind. 
My mother stood by the railing. She held my hand in 
a convulsive grasp and covered me with the cape of her 
long coat. The tears rolled down her cheeks as the 
twinkle of the last shore-lights died and nothing was 
left but darkness of the land she was not to see again. 



[33J 



CHAPTER II 

The American Scene 



The Suevia, scheduled to reach New York on the 
ninth day, did not arrive until the fifteenth. Not a 
fleck of sunshine all those days; a sky almost black, 
a piping wind, a turbulent sea dashing up in huge steel- 
gray waves with bottle-green under-curves and fierce, 
white, fang-like edges. A primaeval, chaotic, brutal 
sea. The great ship quivered and creaked and 
wheezed ; the water slapped against the port-holes and 
ran down the round, dim panes; almost hourly the 
propeller was punched clear above sea-level and 
whirred with a naked, metallic grind. . . . My mother 
was hopelessly sea-sick the whole time; my father and 
I led a dim, nebulous existence, when possible on deck, 
when not, in the red-carpeted saloon. But the sea got 
hold of the innermost core of my mind ; it became part 
of my life, and in inland places I have often caught 
myself tense with desire after its tang and roar. 

Our land-fall was still gray but quiet. Afar off 
lay a dim, hook-like shore. The voyage had liberated 
my father's mind from terror and madness. He was 
so strengthened and cheered that even my mother 
smiled. To come to land at all seemed, after our tre- 

1341 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

inendous experience, almost like coming home. But 
the pier at Hoboken was rough and wild, a place of 
hoarse cries and brute haste and infernal confusion. 
A kindly German-American fellow-rjassenger helped 
us ; saw to it that our luggage was not unduly searched 
and put us in a rumbling hack on our way to an hotel. 
It was Meyer's Hotel, a comfortable, unpretentious 
place. We were worn out and rested well during our 
first night on American soil under the strange mos- 
quito-bars. 

The place where my uncle lived and whither we were 
bound lay far away in the South Atlantic States. But 
my father and mother thought that we ought to rest for 
a day or two and see a city so great and famous as 
New York. A curious timidity kept us, however, from 
venturing far through the grime and rattle. We 
crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, I know, and saw the gilt 
dome of the World Building, then the tallest structure 
on this hemisphere, and the elevated railroad. But 
we did not go up town nor into the financial section, 
drifted somehow into a lake of mud shaken by trucks 
and drays on Canal Street and retreated to Hoboken. 
Being ill-advised we took ship again and spent 
nearly fifty hours on a coast-wise voyage South. We 
could eat no food. Negro stewards served it and over 
it was the Strang© flavor of bananas and Concord 
grapes. There was no storm or gloom now. But the 
brilliantly radiant sea was rough and choppy and the 
steamer small. The weather grew milder and milder 
and when we steamed into Queenshaven harbor the 
day was like spring. 

The bay is one of the most beautiful in the world. 
In its fold lies the old city with its gardens and veran- 

[35] 



UP STREAM 

dans and its few slender spires. Golden-green islands 
extend its curves. The coloring of sea and sky, in 
whatever mood, is of so infinite and delicate a variety 
as though the glow and splendor of all the jewels in 
the world had been melted there. And over city and 
bay lies a rich quietude that steals upon the heart 
through the liquid softness of that untroubled air. I 
heard my father and mother speak of the beauty of the 
scene ; my own sense of it must have been vague. But 
I cannot disassociate that early vision from an hun- 
dred later ones. For that city and bay came to mean 
my boyhood and youth, high passion and aspiration, 
and later a grief that darkened my life. I close my 
eyes : I can see every stone of the old city, every wave 
of the bay. But my mind sees both garbed in a cruel 
and unearthly sweetness. My bodily eyes could endure 
to see neither of them any more. . . . Friends of my 
uncle who were commissioned to meet us missed the 
boat. My father summoned his scraps of English, 
hired a four-wheeler and took us to the Queenshaven 
Hotel. There these people found us, astonished that 
my parents had not yet acquired the habits of poverty 
but had gone boldly to the best hotel in the city. They 
took us to their house where the children astonished me 
by speaking English. It did not seem to me nearly 
so curious in grown persons. I stared at the tattered 
Negroes in the yard, almost too tired to be impressed 
by any strangeness. In the afternoon our friends took 
us to our train, shoved us into a day-coach and hur- 
ried off. 

I recall vividly the long, shabby, crowded car and 
its peculiar reek of peanuts, stale whiskey and chew- 
ing-tobacco. Half of the passengers were burly ne- 

[36] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

groes who gabbled and laughed weirdly. The white 
men wore broad-rimmed wool-hats, whittled and spat 
and talked in drawling tones. I very distinctly shared 
my parents' sense of the wildness, savagery and rough- 
ness of the scene, their horrified perception of its con- 
trast to anything they had ever known or seen. Soon 
the dark fell and at the wayside stations queer, pan- 
like lamps flared up in reddish ribbands of fire. At 
one station a group of men entered carrying tall cud- 
gels. They opened jack-knives and proceeded to peel 
and devour these cudgels. My mother grew almost 
hysterical; my father racked his mind and discovered 
some half-forgotten information on the subject of 
sugar-cane. ... At ten o'clock we reached Saint 
Mark's and trudged out of the car. A man with heavy 
moustaches and clad in a red sweater lifted me from 
the platform. From my previous experience of life 
I judged him to be a porter or a cabby. To my dis- 
gust and amazement he called me by name and kissed 
me on the mouth. It was my uncle. 

n 

In 1890 the village of St. Mark's in South Carolina 
was raw; it had more than a touch of wildness and 
through its life there ran a strain of violence. It con- 
sisted of two principal streets, running diagonally to 
each other and of half a dozen lesser streets that 
trailed off into cotton-fields and pine-forests. There 
was a cotton-seed oil mill, a saw mill and twenty to 
thirty general merchandise stores. Three or four of 
these were housed in one-story buildings of red brick. 
For the rest the village was built of wood and many 

[37] 



UP STREAM 

oX the houses were unpainted, showing the Drowned 
and weather-beaten boards. There was a Methodist 
Church and a Baptist Church, each with a grave-yard 
behind it. North of the village straggled a Negro 
grave-yard, its graves decorated with colored pebbles, 
bits of irridescent glass and the broken shards of cheap 
vases. Here and there, behind houses or in chance 
lanes were small, black, one-roomed huts inhabited by 
Negro women. These women were in domestic service 
in the village and, as I learned later, plied, in addition 
and quite openly, an equally ancient but less honest 
trade. Despite eight or ten bar-rooms the streets were 
quiet except on Saturday. Then the village flared into 
life. Many hundreds of Negroes came in from the 
sparsely settled country; they rode in on horses or 
mules or oxen or drove rough carts and primitive 
wagons, and were themselves generally clad in gar- 
ments of which the original homespun had disappeared 
in a -mass of gaudy patches. They traded and drank 
and, child-like, spent their money on foolish things — 
perfumes and handsome whips and sweets. Toward 
dusk they reeled in a hot turmoil and filled the air 
with that characteristic odor of peanuts and stale 
whiskey and chewing tobacco. 

I watched the village life with a deep sense of its 
strangeness but almost without astonishment. Soon 
I was merged into it and felt quite at home. No, not 
quite. During at least a year, at lengthening intervals 
of course, I felt a sharp nostalgia for the land of my 
birth and its life. Suddenly, at the edge of the forest, 
a sense of grief would overcome me. Somewhere be- 
yond those dark trees, beyond leagues of country, be- 
yond the ocean, lay our home. . . . And I would weep 

[38] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

bitterly. And still, in my maturer years the edge of 
a forest or else a few solitary trees at a great distance 
bring back to me that old sense of wistfulness and 
yearning — no longer for definite scenes or associations, 
but for the mystery of delight I have not known, beauty 
I have not seen, peace I have sought in vain. . . . 

The Southern country-side awakened in me, child 
that I was, a rich, an almost massive joy in nature. 
About a mile beyond the lonely little railroad station 
with its bales of cotton and acrid-smelling sacks of 
yellow guano lay the "red hills." These hills were 
not very high; I could climb them easily; they were 
covered with very tall, very straight pine-trees that 
seemed to me shaft-like and sky-piercing. Through 
a fold of the hills ran a rapid, very shallow little brook 
over a bed of clean, bright pebbles. In spring the 
dogwood showed its white blossoms there ; in the mild 
Southern autumn a child could lie on the deep layers 
of brownish pine-needles and play with the aromatic 
cones and gaze up at the brilliant blue of the sky. 

The summer stirred me deeply. I had been used 
to the cool, chaste, frugal summers of the North. Here 
the heat smote; the vegetation sprang into rank and 
hot luxuriance — noisome weeds with white ooze in 
their stems and bell-like pink flowers invaded the paths 
and streets. I felt a strange throbbing, followed by 
sickish languor and a dumb terror at the frequent, 
fierce thunderstorms. Both my intelligence and my 
instincts ripened with morbid rapidity and I attribute 
many abnormalities of temper and taste that are mine 
to that sudden transplantation into a semi-tropical 
world. . . . 

I was a thorough child nevertheless and delighted 

[39] 



UP STREAM 

in certain acquisitions which, the new world brought 
me — a percussion cap pistol, a mouth organ, a Jew's 
harp. Nor did I give up my old life. My books had 
been saved and, one day, my father discovered that he 
had forgotten a small balance in the Deutsche Bank. 
For this money he ordered books from Germany, and 
I came into possession of a set of very red volumes : 
the marvelous chap-books of the Reformation age — 
Griseldis, Genoveva, Robert the Devil, Dr. Faustus — 
naive and knightly or magical and grim; and of two 
slimmer volumes called Beckers Erzahlungen aus der 
Alten Welt, which contained the Iliad and the Odyssey 
in simple, lucid German prose. In the reading of these, 
especially of the Odyssey, culminated the imaginative 
joyjs of my childhood. I do not know Greek ; I cannot 
read Homer in the original. Yet I am sure that I 
know what Homer is. In a plain room behind the store 
in which apples and cloth and furniture and plough- 
shares and rice and tinned fish were sold to chatter- 
ing Negroes, I sat with my book and clearly heard 

"The surge and thunder of the Odyss ey" 

and saw Nausikaa and her maidens, white limbed and 
fair, on the shore of the wine-dark sea, and dwelt with 
Odysseus on the island of Callypso and returned home 
with him to Ithaca — not without tears — and listened to 
the twanging bow-string that sped the avenging ar- 
rows. The wood-cut that was the frontispiece of the 
little volume showed Hermes on his mission of com- 
mand to Circe. Above floats the god with his staff 
and his winged cap and sandals. Below him stretches 
the immeasurable stream of ocean. In the back- 
ground, small and far but very clear, lies an island 

[40] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

with a tiny fane of Doric columns. I gazed at the 
picture for hours and knew the freshness, the grace 
and the clarity of that morning of the world. 



m 



My uncle and aunt received us into their queer 
little house which was huddled, as though for protec- 
tion, against the shop. The walls of the house were 
of the rudest ; the wind blew through knot-holes in the 
timber. My father and mother were bitterly disap- 
pointed. My uncle had sent the St. Mark's Herald 
to Berlin and my father, who did not understand the 
art and vocabulary of town-booming nor the society 
items of an American village newspaper, assumed that 
St. Mark's was a town of some importance and my 
uncle a prominent citizen. And here he had come to 
a squalid village, the guest of a man well-enough liked 
by his fellow citizens but wretchedly poor. My aunt, 
moreover, though a woman of some kindly qualities, 
was a Jewess of the Eastern tradition, narrow-minded, 
given over to the clattering ritual of pots and pans — 
"meaty" and "milky" — and very ignorant. On the 
very evening of our arrival, having at last withdrawn 
to the one spare bed-room, my father and mother 
looked blankly at each other. A chill wind blew in 
thin, keen streams through chinks in the bare, wooden 
wall, the geese squawked loudly in the muddy yard, my 
aunt was heard scolding her little girls in a mixture 
of Yiddish and English, a little, unshaded kerosene 
lamp made the grim room look all the gloomier. My 
mother sat down on the s^ringless bed, a picture of 
desolation. The sudden plunge unnerved her. All 

[41] 



UP STREAM 

through the voyage we had lived on our accustomed 
plane of civilized comfort. Only here did the descent 
begin. 

She had one consolation that apparently justified 
the whole adventure. My father was a changed man. 
From now on and for many years he was full of energy 
and buoyancy, splendidly patient and brave, always 
ready to cheer her in her fits of loneliness and depres- 
sion. He had shaken off the morbid inhibitions and 
immediately started out into the village to see what 
he could do. 

The people of the village, storekeepers, a few re- 
tired farmers, three physicians, three or four lawyers, 
came of various stocks — English, Scotch-Irish, German, 
even French and Dutch. But they were all descended 
from early nineteenth century settlers and had be- 
come thorough Americans. Everybody belonged to 
either the Baptist or the Methodist church. The 
Methodists were, upon the whole, more refined, had 
better manners than the Baptists and were less illi- 
terate. Among all the villagers there was a moderate 
amount of hard drinking and a good deal of sexual 
irregularity, especially with Mulatto women. I have 
since wondered that there was not more. The life was 
sterile and monotonous enough. They were all kindly, 
even the rougher ones, not very avaricious, no drivers 
of hard bargains, given to talking about shooting but 
doing very little of it. (During the two years of our 
residence two men were shot and in each case upon 
extreme provocation.) Also so far as their light went, 
they were liberal. This was well illustrated by the 
position of the Jews in the village. Of these there 
were about ten families, all recent immigrants, and so 

[42] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

aliens in speech and race and faith. Most of them, 
moreover, were quite prosperous. Yet between them 
and these Southern villagers the relations were hearty 
and pleasant and consolidated by mutual kindness and 
tolerance. Only one Jew and that was my father, was 
looked upon with some suspicion by the severer among 
his Gentile neighbors. The reason was curious and 
significant; he did not perform the external rites of 
the Jewish faith and, upon entering a fraternal life 
insurance order, he smiled and hesitated when asked 
to affirm categorically his belief in a personal God. 

He soon saw that there was nothing to be done in 
St. Mark's except add another to the existing shops. 
But since nearly every one seemed to have prospered 
and since the quiet and the easy, democratic atmosphere 
of the place appealed to him, he hesitated but little. 
Help and good advice were offered alike by Jew and 
Gentile and, at the end of a few months, we were in- 
stalled in some pleasant rooms beside one of the few 
brick stores on Main Street. There was the usual 
heterogeneous stock of food and implements, furniture 
and dry-goods. My mother went to Queenshaven and 
bought adequate furniture for our little home. 

Although she yearned very bitterly for her native 
land, her friends and kin, for music and for all the 
subtle supports of the civilization in which she was so 
deeply rooted, life opened fairly enough. Domestic 
service cost next to nothing, food was plentiful and 
cheap. Even friends were not wanting. Our landlord 
and his family, prominent members of the Methodist 
church, saw soon enough that my father and mother 
were of a different mental type and of different antece- 
dents from the other Jews in St. Mark's. There fol- 

[43] 



UP STREAM 

lowed an exchange of visits. Mrs. C. gave my mother 
much good advice, explained to her many American 
ways and manners that seemed very strange, and tried 
to console her in regard to her most burning and imme- 
diate problem — that of my education. This friendship 
led to others. And so when summer came, we who had 
no vegetable garden — and would have been just as help- 
less had we had one — received daily attentions from 
our Gentile friends: baskets of tomatoes or okra or 
sweet-corn or bell-pepper. And one friend, a very aged 
physician who liked and admired my mother and had 
a dim but steady perception of her profound spiritual 
isolation, sent her weekly a great basketful of roses. 
My father, at the same time, found a congenial com- 
panion in a young lawyer. The two played chess to- 
gether and from him my father borrowed Shakespeare 
and Byron, Dickens and Thackeray and Scott with 
whose works he was, like all educated Germans, thor- 
oughly familiar and whom he now read with avidity 
in their own language. We saw a good deal of my 
uncle and his family and their friends. But culturally 
we really felt closer to the better sort of Americans 
in the community, and so there began in those early 
days that alienation from my own race which has been 
the source to me of some good but of more evil. 

IV 

I do not know how I learned English. My memory 
which is so clear on things quite trivial fails me at 
this crucial point. My mother characteristically de- 
sired to engage a teacher for me. And for this pur- 
pose my uncle introduced the Baptist minister of the 
village. At the end of one lesson, however, of which 

[44] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

my memory is most faint, the Reverend Mr. Cross- 
land declared that far better results could he obtained 
if I were to attend his school. This advice was fol- 
lowed and my next memory, in the matter of language, 
shows me in my little German velvet suit and cap 
seated aloft on sacks of cotton-seed in the postmas- 
ter's shop and explaining, in some sort of English, 
the peculiarities of German life to a crowd of tall, 
rough tobacco-spitting but evidently tender-hearted 
yokels. Tender-hearted! For they asked the quaint 
little German boy to come again and again and never 
teased him but were, in what must have been their 
amusement, unfailingly gentle and considerate. 

There was no public school in St. Mark's in my 
time. And so the Baptist congregation had built a 
school-house of rough unpainted timber on a barren 
field beside the church. Here Crossland and one young 
woman, in a single gaunt room, taught about an hun- 
dred boys and girls, ranging in age from seven to 
seventeen. Some of the children came a distance of 
ten miles to school and to every available tree were 
tethered Texas ponies or mules, some saddled, some 
hitched to road-carts or buggies. Details that stand 
out in my memory are the sombre glow of the cast- 
iron stove on cold days, the plaintive notes of some 
birds circling over the little Baptist grave-yard, the 
hair — yellow as wheat — and the brilliantly white teeth 
of one of the older girls. And two things inspired in 
me a vague sense of fear: the switches with which the 
Reverend Mr. Crossland occasionally beat the boys' 
legs and the old cigar-box, filled with earth, into which 
he spat amazing streams of repulsive brown juice. 
Sometimes he would order a boy to empty and refill 

[45] 



UP STREAM 

this box and I lived in terror of being singled out for 
this office. I never was. But the existence of this box, 
betrayed in one of my rare moments of talkativeness, 
astonished my parents so overwhelmingly that they 
forthwith removed me from the school. 

My relations to my fellow-pupils were slight. There 
was much friendliness on both sides, but a dreamy, 
childish absorption kept me solitary. I am certain of 
only this: that I was reprimanded for steadily aban- 
doning the boys' side of the play-ground during recess 
and losing myself among the girls. They were gentler 
and aroused in me a faint, impersonal perception of 
comeliness. . . . 

The village possessed one other school which charged 
a somewhat higher fee — two dollars a month, I think — 
and boasted an aristocratic flavor. It was kept by a 
broken-down gentleman of Huguenot extraction who 
was said to have been immensely wealthy and to have 
lived in a state of barbaric splendor before the Civil 
War. Major Maury was a man prematurely old, 
slightly deaf and shaken by palsy. His features were 
almost hidden by harsh bunches of beard, and hair 
grew in long strands out of his ears and nostrils. He 
sat by a window, smoking a pipe and chewing tobacco 
at the same time. There, in a weary, mechanical way, 
he heard the lessons which we were supposed to have 
prepared in the other bare rooms or on the porch of the 
windy and abandoned cottage. The ten or twelve pu- 
pils played and studied around that sunken-eyed old 
man in a half-hearted kind of way; the manner and the 
mood of the place float to me across the years in 
images of chill discouragement and mouldering deso- 
lation. 

[46] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

But by this time my mother, with the energy which 
marked those early days, had acquired a considerable 
English vocabulary and had taken council of her friend 
Mrs. C. She removed me from Major Maury's "acad- 
emy" and proceeded to prepare me for entrance to 
the High School of Queenshaven. It was a fine and 
brave action. She h&d been in America less than a 
year; her pronunciation was very imperfect; she had 
to teach me with a German-English dictionary in hand. 
Yet my days of mere dreamy loitering were over and I 
have never had instruction more accurate or solid. 
We had Appleton's Fifth Reader, Smith's English 
Grammar, Noah "Webster's Speller, a geography and 
an arithmetic. I have not seen those books since, but 
I can visualize many of their pages to this day. 

In the reader I came upon my first fragments of 
English literature: Addison's Vision of Mirza, 
Childe Harold's Farewell To His Native Land, and 
The Death of Absalom, by Nathaniel Parker Willis. 
I felt even then that the last piece was clumsy and 
rhetorical, nor did Byron touch me; Addison's fable 
seemed exquisite — as, indeed, it is — and I read it over 
and over. . . . But stronger and coarser food for my 
childish mind was at hand in the English books which 
now came to me and which I evidently read with an 
entire absence of effort. The first was, by a queer 
chance, The Swiss Family Robinson. I recognized its 
inferiority to my familiar German versions of Crusoe 
and Gulliver, but its strange blending of the exotic 
and the matter of fact drew me on and I sedulously 
skipped the moralizing. ... At the same time, how- 
ever, there was given me a set of yellowish, paper- 
backed books. I recall the title of but one: Tom 

[47] 



UP STREAM 

Tracy, The Newsboy. These were books of the Hora- 
tio Alger type, but better done, I think, and not so 
stereotyped. They took possession of my mind by a 
strong and coarse compulsion. For I had been nursed 
upon beauty. The clearness and grace of the Homeric 
world, the pageantry of the Middle Age, islands in the 
tropic seas at the ends of the earth — these were pos- 
sessions of my imagination. And so these tales of New 
York boys who were " manly" and "got on" seemed 
to me of an overwhelming reality. The hideous moral 
utilitarianism, the vulgar confusion of values in these 
books passed, of course, entirely over my head. I 
didn't want to get on; I hadn't a spark of ambition; I 
never thought or prattled, as many children do, of 
what I would be when I grew up. I read these books, 
at the age of ten, with the same sense of deeply satis- 
fied absorption in the fine, narrowy realities of life 
with which, at the end of another decade, I first read 
Vanity Fair and Mme. Bovary. 



Suddenly, upon a day amid the steady radiance of 
that Southern summer a blind, imperious impulse took 
hold of me. Though always clumsy with my hands and 
careless of manual skill, I hastened into our little yard, 
gathered some abandoned boxes and built me a rude, 
shaky little desk. It was too high to sit at. So I 
stood and wrote — for the first time — verse and prose : 
tales of disaster at sea, of ultimate islands, of peace- 
less wandering. The prose and verse were mixed in- 
discriminately, assonance sufficed in place of rime, all 
I felt was an intense inner glow. It was all instinc- 

[48] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

tively done in German. And I emphasize this fact in 
the development of an American since that childish 
outburst marked the first and last time on which I 
used my original mother-tongue in writing as a matter 
of course and without a sense of deliberately limiting 
such powers of expression as I may have. . . . That 
first impulse lasted, with daily but decreasing passion, 
for some weeks. Then it died out. I neither wondered 
nor regretted it. To me it was a solitary game, and 
most of my amusements were solitary. Perhaps the 
shifting from one language to another caused this, per- 
haps a momentous change in my inner life which now; 
took place. 

Our friend, Mrs. C, was a very fervent member of 
her church. She was too well bred to engage in crude 
proselytising. But, seeing that we observed no Jew- 
ish rites, she suggested that it would improve my Eng- 
lish if I were to join her Sunday School class. My 
mother who had precious memories of snow-swept 
Christmas services in her native East Prussian village, 
made no objection. My father, an agnostic reared on 
Huxley and Haeckel, had no prejudices for or against 
any religious cult. The question was settled much 
more smoothly than, I imagine, Mrs. C. had hoped. 
She was intensely interested in her new pupil, yet her 
interest was never tactless or obtrusive. I have grown 
infinitely far away from her teaching; I have nothing 
but kindness for her memory. 

The small, white church with its wooden belfry was 
like a thousand others. It stood in a sun-flooded street, 
behind it were scattered graves and then cotton fields 
running to olive or brownish pine-forests. The calm 
of the village Sundays was truly sabbatical and the 

[49] 



UP STREAM 

clear, solitary ringing of the church-bell had a shrill 
and primitive sweetness to my ears. I cannot tell by 
what swift stages I entered into the faith and spirit of 
the place. No persuasion was used and, apparently, 
none was needed. My memory shows me almost at 
once treasuring small, gilt attendance cards, exchang- 
ing these for larger ones, quite at home in lesson-quar- 
terlies, golden texts and the familiar hymn-tunes. The 
best of the latter had much to do with my conversion. 
They still seem to me, despite my present devotion to 
far other kinds of music, to express in no ignoble way, 
the triumphs and the aspirations of the Christian life. 
. . . The other night, with a dear companion, I passed 
a gaudy, modern church. A large congregation was 
singing Eock of Ages. As by a common impulse we 
stopped under the autumnal trees and listened. We 
knew, without speech, the strange desiderium in each 
other's hearts. For the poetry and beauty and the 
deep human need voiced by the Church came to us with 
that melody. Had we gone in, the banal prayers, the 
tawdry and vulgar sermon, the silly self-righteous- 
ness of the publicans and sinners within would have 
irritated or amused us . . . But in those distant years 
in St. Mark's the poetry and the beauty and the human 
need alone reached my mind and my emotions. I al- 
ways staid after Sunday School to attend the morning 
service. But I am sure I hardly heard what the lank, 
gesticulating minister said. I accepted the Gospel 
story and the obvious implications of Pauline Christ- 
ianity without question and felt — as I now know 
through critical retrospection — a spirit and a faith not 
wholly unlike that of the primitive Church. In the 
phraseology of our Protestant sects, I accepted Jesus 

[50] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

as my personal Savior and cultivated, with vivid faith, 
the habit of prayer in which I persisted for many 
years. 

My old life, however, was not dead. I read Homer 
and my German legends with the same imaginative 
naivete as before. But I did absorb, unconsciously, of 
course, a very large set of moral and social conventions 
that are basic to the life of the average American. I 
stress the word absorb. There can be no question of 
reflection or conviction on the part of the child. But 
at the age of ten my emotional assimilation into the 
social group of which I was a physical member was 
complete. I would not have touched any alcoholic 
drink ; I would have shrunk in horor from a divorced 
person; I would have felt a sense of moral discom- 
fort in the presence of an avowed sceptic. I believed 
in the Blood of the Lamb ... I find it hard not to let 
an ironic note slip into these phrases. But they mark 
the sober facts. If ever the child of immigrants em- 
braced the faith of the folk among whom it came — I 
was that child. Insensibly almost I withdrew myself 
from my cousins and from the other Jewish children 
in the village. The sons and daughters of Mrs. C. 
were my chief playmates and, above all, a cousin of 
theirs who stirred my ever watchful sense of beauty. 
My parents I instinctively and unquestioningly ex- 
empted from this division. Nor did I talk about these 
things at home. I listened, as always, with deep pleas- 
ure to my mother's stories of her old home; I was in- 
terested in letters and gifts that came from our kins- 
men across the ocean. But the old life grew fainter 
in its influence; it seemed hardly any more a part of 
this present experiencing. With the boys and girls of 

[51] 



UP STREAM 

the Sunday School I went into the woods and fields 
for flowers at Easter, and when, at Christmas, my 
mother was saddened by yearning for her German 
home, I sorrowed only in her sorrow, myself quite at 
one with the life about me. 

Ji 

I need scarcely say that my parents did not so 
readily adapt themselves to the folk-ways of the sur- 
prising land in which they found themselves. My 
mother especially, had an emotional tenacity which 
made her road the harder. Nor did she find a degree 
of compensation, as my father did, in the apparent ab- 
sence of that pressure which he had experienced in a 
denser moral and economic environment. She consoled 
herself with the thought, however, that St. Mark's was 
but a rude backwoods village and steadily hoped for 
fairer conditions in some larger center of American 
civilization. It was from this point of view that she 
cultivated, in her scant leisure, a growing interest in 
English literature and worked hard at my training in 
the new language. 

My father's case I have not stated adequately in 
the words — absence of pressure. For many weeks he 
was like one liberated from a dungeon. It was really 
recovery from mental illness. But he did not realize 
that and, in his impulsive way, attributed many extra- 
ordinary virtues to American life. He discussed 
politics with friends and neighbors — it was the Harri- 
son-Cleveland campaign — read the old Eclectic Eeview, 
Byron and Dickens, played chess, and neglected his 
§hop or treated the Negro customers with contempt- 

[52] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

uous disregard. His vision was fixed on far other 
things. He was an excellent draughtsman and a store- 
house of scientific knowledge. In Germany he had in- 
vented an intricate and clever machine, had obtained 
patents for it there, in Austria and in France, and had 
then sold it for a moderate sum. He now read in the 
circular of a Washington firm of patent lawyers of the 
urgent need for a non-refillable bottle. He accepted 
this statement with the naivete of a German and rigged 
up a little work-room in the back of the shop. The 
bottle was duly invented ; the device was a notably in- 
genious one. With a few tools he himself made several 
beautifully finished models, drew up the specifications 
and — considered his fortune made. For weeks we lived 
in a state of exquisite anticipation. How much would 
be offered? Twenty-five, fifty, a hundred thousand 
dollars ? My mother had her misgivings. But things 
had gone so badly with the realities at hand that she 
deliberately indulged in this beautiful dream ... It was 
the last time . . . 

Must I add that the bubble burst? A letter came 
from the patent attorneys so glaringly dishonest be- 
neath all its speciousness that there was no room for 
further self-deception. Certain brutal facts had to be 
faced: trade had never been good and my father's 
small capital was all but gone. For a good part of the 
second summer we lived on rice and beans and such 
tinned goods as were left on the shelves of the shop. 
In autumn there was a respite of hope, but it was 
quite brief. Creditors became troublesome and my 
father, thoroughly German in this too, never dreamed 
that he could leave them unpaid. He and my mother 
sold their costly watches and chains and the remaining 

[53] 



UP STREAM 

stock in the shop brought a trifle at auction. "When all 
debts had been paid there remained a little over four 
hundred dollars. With this sum my father determined 
to take his little family to Queenshaven, the nearest 
city; of any size, and begin life anew. Throughout he 
was brave, cheerful and active. And to be sure he 
was only thirty-two years 1 old and quite unable to 
estimate either the qualities of the environment to 
which he was going or the fatal development of cer- 
tain forces within himself. 

To me it was like starting out on a bright adventure. 
The days of the Southern winter were temperate and 
golden and a city seemed a fine place to go to. There 
would be the bay which I had seen and ships from all 
the ends of the earth. The thought of school I tried to 
put away from me. Then there was the fascinating 
bustle of packing and departure and a journey on the 
train which, though but four hours long, engaged my 
imagination. The days were full of life and promise 
to a boy of ten . . . 

— A few years ago I passed through St. Mark's. 
The train rolled along the old embankment on the edge 
of which we used to gather wild blackberries. I am 
told that the village has grown and is now a county- 
seat. But it seemed small and remote. No doubt they 
are hustling and booming far more efficiently now and 
the smallness and remoteness were in my personal 
vision. But I know that in the early nineties of the 
last century there lingered in that village — as there 
did doubtless in many other places — something of that 
honest simplicity, that true democratic kindliness 
which we like to associate with the years of the primi- 
tive Eepublic. In the name of those qualities and the 

[54] 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 

ideals which they illustrate the capitalistic tout still 
seeks to rob us, the brazen-tongued demagogue to be- 
tray us. Those things are gone. But as part of my 
imaginative inheritance as an American I own them by 
virtue of the two ytears of my childhood spent in St. 
Mark's in South Carolina. 



[55] 



CHAPTER ni 

The Making of an Amebican 



Queenshaven. I hear the sharp, quick rustling of 
the palmettos, the splash and murmur of the incoming 
tide, the melancholy song of Negroes across the bay; 
I see the irridescent plaster of the old walls at sun- 
set, the crescent moon, so clear and, silvery, over the 
light-house, the white magnolias in their olive foliage ; 
I feel the full, rich sweetness of that incomparable 
air : above all, I can feel — across the gulfs of time and 
circumstance — the throb of the impassioned heart of 
my own youth . . . Stale phrases ! I have tried be- 
fore to describe the city. But I cannot do it. No man 
who has been young in the deep and true sense can 
render into words the scene of his youth. For that 
has taken its colors from a poetry, a passion, a tragic 
beauty that are beyond all speech. I see a sunset now 
and remark that it is fine and turn away to worry 
over yesterday's news from Russia and to-morrow's 
article. When I was a lad in Queenshaven the solemn, 
streaming sunsets over the bay were song and heroism 
and immortality to me. "When the sun's great, red 
disc set behind the dusky islands and the first stars 
pulsed through the afterglow, I knew the universe to 

[56] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

be divine and perfect and my eyes filled with tears. 
Wordsworth is right in the psychology of his great 
ode, whatever we may think of its metaphysics. Life 
encroaches upon our innermost selves and hardens and 
blunts them. The glory and the freshness are no more. 

We arrived in Queenshaven on Washington's birth- 
day. There was a parade which my mother took me 
to see, but the parade did not seem amusing to either 
of us and we went back to the house at which we were 
staying. It was a boarding-house recommended to us 
by Mrs. C. The house was a spacious one with a fine 
verandah on each story; around it extended a large 
though ill-kept garden. It was situated near the 
centre of the town; for two airy rooms and board for 
three my father payed eleven dollars a week. This 
was considered a very fair price in Queenshaven in 
1892. The only thing we had to provide was the fuel 
for the two fire-places on chilly days. A supply of 
this we stored on the back verandah. And so, in a day 
or two, we were comfortably settled. Almost immedi- 
ately, however, there came to us in some impalpable 
way a sense of something we had never felt in St. 
Mark's: invisible barriers seemed to arise about us, 
a silence seemed to fall where we were, an iron isola- 
tion to be established. All this was faint at first and 
could not be put into words ; it took years to become a 
definite, tangible thing; I did not fully or consciously 
face it until it had been partly broken down. But that 
was too late. It had done its disastrous work. 

Queenshaven was then — and I have reason to think 
it but little changed — a city of very rigid social groups. 
The majority of these were denominational in charac- 
ter: Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian. But 

[57] 



UP STREAM 

any family in any of these groups, primarily the 
Protestant ones, that attained any degree of educa- 
tion or wealth, would tend to withdraw from its 
original friends and social life and try, by any means, 
to be reckoned among the small, conservative group 
which consisted of the members and descendants of 
the old Southern slave-holding aristocracy. For this 
group was and is considered representative of the city 
and has given to it all its flavor and romance and fame. 
It was but a few years ago, for instance, that for the 
first time a common man and not a member of a very 
limited group of families was elected mayor of Queens- 
haven. Now it is clear that my parents could find no 
friends among the humbler Catholics or Presbyterians 
as such. And it is equally clear that persons who were 
shedding their next of kin as one sheds old clothes in 
a struggle to attain social distinction were not going to 
impede their progress by so much as the acquaintance 
of a little family of German Jews. The interesting 
question arises: Why, then, did not my parents join 
either one of two other groups — a German- American 
and a Jewish one? Their instinct in this matter was 
a fine although a quite tragically mistaken one. They 
conceived the country in which they had made their 
home as obviously one of English speech and culture. 
Hence, without a shadow of disloyalty to their German 
training, they desired to be at one with such of their 
English-speaking countrymen as shared their tastes 
in art and in literature and — mutatis mutandis — their 
outlook on life. They saw no reason for associating 
with North German peasants turned grocers (although 
they had the kindliest feelings toward these sturdy and 
excellent people), nor with rather ignorant, semi- 

[58] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

orthodox Jews from Posen. They had not done so in 
Berlin. Why should they in America where, as my 
father used to observe in those earliest years, a demo- 
cratic spirit must prevail, and where neither poverty 
nor a humble employment could keep an educated man 
from the society of his intellectual equals. That was, 
according to him, the precise virtue of America, the 
fundamental spiritual implication of American life! 
The result of my parents' acceptance of this principle 
was utter friendlessness. They were left in a state of 
solitariness which would have broken stronger and 
better-balanced natures. The strain of wild eccentric- 
ity in my father's character sharpened, my mother's 
brooding melancholy deepened from year to year. 
"When after nearly fifteen years in Queenshaven a 
breach was made in that inhuman wall, my father was 
hopelessly " queer" as a social being; my mother — 
whose sweet and gracious presence atoned with peo- 
ple for his rasping ways — had become morbid and 
morbidly suspicious of this belated kindness. I look 
back and see with a cruel clearness how that loneli- 
ness ate into their hearts; how though they rarely 
spoke of it, they were warped and embittered by it. 
The same dreary tasks day after day, year after year ; 
the same lonely lamplight in the evening; never a 
knock at the door or the sound of a friendly voice. 
And for the first ten years they were too poor to go 
to the theatre or to concerts. 

After various other attempts my father drifted 
into the furniture business. He was employed by a 
large house to sell furniture among the Negroes and 
collect the installments from week to week. After a 
day of this wretched toil — which he did well and for 

[59] 



UP STREAM 

which, during the second decade, he was not ill-paid — 
I have seen him spend the evening intensely absorbed 
in Bradley's Appearance and Reality. Such was his 
real life. And my mother was, in her native tongue, 
a true poet. And never a footstep on the stair . . . They 
had accepted the promise of American life. Nor, be 
it observed, would their fate have been different in a 
larger and more typical American community. Happier 
it would have been, no doubt. For they would have 
fallen in with cultivated Germans and Jews. But that, 
clearly, does not touch the problem. It was in Queens- 
haven that the Anglo-American ideal of assimilation 
which they embraced could be tested and adjudged. 



The situation, as I have said, took some years to 
define itself. Immediately there was, for us all, the 
beauty and stir of the town. For me, above all, there 
was that house with its verandahs and its tangled gar- 
den. The early Southern spring came upon the city 
almost at once, first with lilies and the innumerable 
blossoms of the wistaria, then with roses that, dotting 
a gnarled, old vine, trembled at our very windows and 
filled the verandah with petals. My mother and I took 
daily walks and inhaled the fragrant loveliness of the 
place and the season. But I was always glad to re- 
turn to the house. I played at its being a castle and 
myself, upon the verandah, a warder, a Scottish archer 
at some dark keep in France. For at an auction house 
my father had bought a very good set of the Waverly 
novels and I was living in a magnificent world, a page- 
ant of infinite variety and splendor. The tall, green 

[60] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

double-columned volumes were rarely out of my hands. 
Within a few months I had read all the novels, or 
nearly all. I never succeeded in finishing Count Rob- 
ert of Paris, although it has left with me a vision of 
empty Byzantine halls through which is heard the ring- 
ing echo of a solitary mailed tread ; I did not read 
Waverly till years later. My favorites which were soon 
definitely chosen I read tirelessly over and over: 
Quentin Durward, The Talisman, The Heart of Mid- 
lothian, Rob Roy, The Betrothed, The Black Dwarf, 
Anne of Geierstein, A Legend of Montrose. I liked the 
gloomy and the romantic ; that is clear. But character 
was beginning to appeal to me too, and I tasted to the 
full of the fine essential humanity of the Dean family, 
of the Baillie Nicol Jarvie, of the redoubtable Dugald 
Dalgetty. I worshipped Diana Vernon in all my wak- 
ing dreams. My students in later years told me they 
cannot read Scott. Strange. They were not common- 
ly so sensitive to a lack of grace and finish in style and 
structure. And what a creator of men and scenes and 
actions Sir Walter was! What sweep he had, what 
imagination, what ample power. As for me, I enjoyed 
even those opening chapters of which I hear such 
querulous complaints; I enjoyed the very notes and 
puzzled out the crabbed Latin as soon as I could and 
felt the pride of knowledge. I was glad many of the 
novels were long. They seemed like the weeks and 
months of childhood ; one could really live in them and 
forget the troublesome world of duties and compul- 
sions. 

A few months later came another of those massive 
revelations which are among the glories of our earlier 
years : Dickens. In lank, acrid-smelling, paper-backed 

[61] 



UP STREAM 

volumes came Pickwick, Nickleby, Chuzzlewit, Oliver 
Twist, A Tale of Two Cities. Not, alas, David Copper- 
field. The false, strained effort in A Tale of Two 
Cities I was too young to perceive. Yet I know that I 
could not live in it as richly and as fully as in the 
others — books which again contained a world. Not a 
world, I think now, that has much veracity or perma- 
nent significance, but in its vast and busy imaginative 
structure self -consistent, racy, and full of fine, concrete 
things — beef and punch and stage-coaches and gaols, 
thwackings and counting-houses, practical jokes and 
prisons, mud and rags and laughter . . . 

I still prayed every night. But these books ab- 
sorbed me and I went neither to Sunday School nor to 
church. My faith was tenacious enough, but it grew 
less active. Then, by the merest accident, there came 
a brief but burning revelation. The boarding-house 
was kept by an Irish family, friendly and far from 
ignorant. The head of the house, a small, straight, 
white-bearded, crimson-faced man, very silent and al- 
ways more or less in liquor, took a fancy to me. One 
Sunday morning we began to talk. He had been a sea- 
faring man in his youth and I found his talk sharp 
with the tang of ships and voyages. I fetched my hat 
and walked on with him. Somehow, presently, I found 
myself beside him in the family pew in the old pro- 
Cathedral and witnessed the celebration of a High 
Mass. 

The reading of Scott had not left me without an 
imaginative perception of the rich historic dignity,, the 
human associations of the Roman ritual. But it touched 
to the very quick my sense of beauty. I was power- 
less before it as I am before beauty still. The organ 

[62] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

was the best I had ever heard and my taste in music 
was even then not uncultivated. But the glimmering 
vestments of the priests, the dreamy candles, the 
strange bell, the elevation of the Host on which fell a 
pencil of softened light — all these things moved me 
profoundly. And I still think that, if one could but 
grant the tremendous premises all these symbols do, 
in a lovely and. human fashion, elevate and attune the 
soul . . . When we came out of the dusky church the 
sunlight seemed raw and like an affront. I went home 
but did not speak of what I had experienced. All 
week long, however, the altar candles shone like fiery 
topazes in my waking dreams and the sonorous music 
echoed in my t ears. I was sorry that I had not a rosary 
as a visible symbol of that marvelous church. 

I went to mass every Sunday. A Catholic family 
of French descent moved into the boarding-house ; the 
children and I became friends and so I was naturally 
drawn to go with them. The services became my great 
passion. I even went to Vespers, and more and more 
it seemed to me that to be a priest of this Church 
would be a calling that would satisfy every instinct 
of my nature. Such was the first plan that I made for 
my adult years . . . 

Was it all a child's shallow religiosity? Not all, I 
think. For I had a sense, shadowy and inarticulate, 
but deep enough, of our homelessness in the universe, 
of our terrible helplessness before it. I had seen some- 
thing of misfortune and uncertainty and change and 
my mind desired then as, with such frugal hope, it does 
now, a point of permanence in the "vast drif tings of 
the cosmic weather," a power in which there is no 
variableness, neither shadow of turning. 

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UP STREAM 

And I had a dream which added another demerit 
to my inner life, a dream that has stayed with me in 
its stark and preternatural vividness these many years. 
I dreamed that I was in a large, empty room with 
brown walls. The door opened slowly and as it opened 
my heart beat with insupportable fear. My mother 
entered and I saw at once that her face was ghastly 
white. She did not speak. She looked into my eyes 
and fell forward, and I heard the thud of her head on 
the wood . . . From that time on my prayers were all 
propitiatory. I often prayed and wept in an agony of 
apprehension. I would stop on the street suddenly 
and pray to ward off evil from her. I invented 
strange, childish rituals in the efficacy of which I would 
trust for a time and then abandon them for others. My 
freedom from care was gone beyond recall and all my 
religious emotions centered about an inner core of 
gloom. 

m 

In October, 1893, after an oral examination which, 
thanks to my mother's instruction, I passed with ease, 
I was admitted to the High School of Queenshaven. 
The school building is plain and dignified, somewhat 
after the fashion of an English mansion of the eigh- 
teenth century. What the school has become in re- 
cent years I do not know. I have heard rumors of 
courses in bookkeeping and shorthand and other dex- 
terities that have nothing to do with the education of 
youth. In my time it was a good school. The pupils 
were all boys and they were taught by men. They were 
young enough to be grounded in the necessities of a 
liberal education without having their callow judgment 

L64] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

consulted, and to be caned when they were lazy or 
rowdy. The school had one grave fault : Greek was an 
elective study, Through this fault my life sustained 
an irreparable loss. Yet when I consider what might 
have happened to my mind if the school had been like 
the High Schools of 1921, I am filled with a sense of 
gratitude. For I was enabled to lay the foundations 
of a sound and permanent knowledge of Latin and 
French ; I was taught to study with thoroughness and 
accuracy under pain of tangible and very wholesome 
penalties, and it was not the fault of the school that 
my mind was and is all but impervious to any form 
of mathematical reasoning. 

I passed into the rough and tumble of school life 
with a distinct shudder. There was no direct hazing 
but there was a good deal of rather cruel horse-play. 
You were apt to be tripped up and thrown on your 
back, to have pins and needles stuck viciously into you, 
to be held under the pump until you nearly choked. 
Also, during the first year, I was taunted with being 
a foreigner and a Jew. One boy especially tormented 
me — a tallish fellow with huge mouth always distorted 
by idiotic laughter, hateful, off standing ears and small, 
greenish eyes. I was no match for him in strength and 
he persisted in cuffing and thumping and taunting me. 
I tried to avoid him, for I shrank from the thought of 
touching him as shudderingly as I did from his touch. 
Then, one day he clapped me brutally on the back 
and yelled with laughter. Two scarlet lights danced 
before my eyes and I leapt at his throat. Boys hur- 
ried from all sides of the play-ground and formed a 
ring around us. Cries arose: "Fight fair!" I re- 
membered how the contemptuous thoughts raced 

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through my brain. Fight fair ! Oh yes, give the over- 
grown lout a chance to trounce me as a reward for 
months of bruises and insults. I didn't want to fight 
him and suffer more undeserved pain and humiliation. 
I wanted to hurt him, to hurt him so effectively that he 
would never again dare lay his red, bony claws on me. 
I did. A teacher had to come into the yard and order 
me to be torn from my gasping and bloody victim. I 
had no trouble after that . . . 

Gradually, too, I fell in with a group of boys that 
belonged to the gentler families of Queenshaven. I 
shall have more to say of them later, for these class- 
mates passed together through school and college with 
me and so lived on terms of daily intimacy with me 
for eight years. Through their companionship, at all 
events, I soon felt at home in the school, an equal 
among equals in play and study. 

I have said that our teachers were men. Real men, 
I hasten to add, not the spiritual starvelings who are 
content nowadays with the wage-slavery of the High 
School. The salaries of these Queenshaven teachers 
were rather better than such salaries are to-day and 
the purchasing power of money was of course far 
greater. The principal was the only man I have 
ever known who truly embodied the peculiar ideal of 
the Christian gentleman. He had both sweetness and 
strength, profound piety and wide charity. I can still 
see the beautiful benevolence in his searching blue eyes 
and hear his clear, bell-like voice. I do not know 
whether he consciously thought of the methods of 
Arnold of Rugby ; it is certain that he practiced them. 
The better natured of my schoolmates and I never re- 
sented his punishments ; we knew he was incapable of 

[66] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

inflicting them until in his kind and manly judgment 
forgiveness would have been morally harmful to the 
offender. His influence and example drew me back to 
the Methodist church ... It is a sad reflection that this 
good man's end was pitiful. A trusted brother in the 
church absconded with all our principal's modest sav- 
ings. They were small enough, for he was liberal in 
his charities beyond the bounds of discretion. But this 
blow both in its moral and in its physical aspect over- 
whelmed him. He fell into a state of melancholia and I 
remember him, in later years, a mild, vague-eyed, 
broken figure on the Queenshaven streets. 

I shall not linger over the burly and severe but 
sound pedagogue who taught us history and physics 
nor over the graceful youth — still young and vivid in 
his middle age — who taught French and German with 
a stringent accuracy and sternness that added virility 
to his Greek profile and his curving locks. It is on our 
teacher of Latin that I must dwell. I cannot estimate 
his influence over me. To this day I find myself using 
locutions and mannerisms that are ultimately trace- 
able to him. He was — I beg his pardon for writing of 
him as in the past, but to me he lives only in the past, 
though admirably and fruitfully to others in their 
present — he was the son of an Italian gentleman, obvi- 
ously of gentle lineage and exquisite breeding. His face 
and head and hands and form had in them something 
indescribably Roman. Roman of the empire. But for 
his severer modern morals he might have been a friend 
of Petronius and, like him, an arbiter elegantiarum. 
Or, from another point of view, a gentleman of the age 
bf Queen Ann — a friend of Addison. Of course this 
does not render the whole man. But he was singularly 

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free from all the modern maladies of the soul — a 
devout Catholic with a frugal and pagan delight in the 
good things of the world, a lover of the arts without 
morbid intensity or perverting ambitions, a believer 
in that golden mean which he interpreted so well. I 
need hardly say that the particular objects of his tire- 
less and exquisite zeal were Vergil and Horace and, 
among English writers, Milton and Tennyson and 
Thackeray. 

As a teacher he was strict, though always with a 
light touch — stinging the lazy and loutish by some 
ironic turn of speech. He taught us to appreciate a 
fine and mellow Latinity as well as the human warmth 
and living power of the literature we read. But he 
was tireless, too, in the humbler portions of his task. 
I find that I know my Latin accidence and syntax bet- 
ter to-day than graduate students who "major" in 
Latin at our universities. And I can still hear his 
voice as, repeating some line of Vergil, he first awak- 
ened me to the magic of a great and perfect style. 

" . . . et jam nox umida coelo 
praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos." 

It was in the third year of High School. He was 
teaching us to scan Vergil. We were repeating a 
passage in unison. Suddenly he swung on his heel 
and pointed his finger straight at me: "That is the 
only boy who has a natural ear for verse ! " he cried. 
A keen, strange quiver went through me. I realized 
the meaning suddenly of that constant scribbling 
which I had been impelled to during the preceding 
months. I had a gift for literature ! I knew it now ; 
I never doubted it again. My fate had found me. 

[68] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

IV 

I continued to buy little note-books and to fill 
them with verse. I neglected my tasks at school and 
bore my punishments stolidly. When my father ex- 
plained problems in mathematics or physics to me, I 
did not listen and took his solutions to school. They 
were correct, of course, but I could not explain them. 
I wrote dozens of stanzas a day; I was obsessed by a 
strange, aching fever and found no relief but in verse. 
The verse, of course, was childish — half sentimental, 
half-religious — yet often full of a bitter and, as it now 
seems to me, pathetic yearning. I can see myself — 
(we had long moved into the two upper floors of a 
pleasant enough house) — a boy of thirteen, on the up- 
stairs verandah that faced the sunset, watching the 
trees grow dark against the sky and the evening star 
emerge. There I stood or sat throbbing with a passion 
for poetry that I still think was rare and not ignoble. 
No, for there was blended with it a profound humility, 
an earnest realization of the utter worthlessness of 
what I was writing and would write for years to come. 
Only at the end of that long vista of years shone the 
star of my hope. Some day, somehow, I would be 
a poet. 

I abandoned the German books of my childhood. I 
stopped speaking German even at home. Seeking re- 
lief from the passion and the yearning that consumed 
me I read, half-surreptitiously, the African tales of 
Rider Haggard or even cheap detective stories. But 
this period of merely silly reading was brief. By a 
happy chance I became acquainted with a writes* who 
gave tone and vigor to my boyish mind and fixed it 

[69] 



UP STREAM 

upon great ideas and great affairs. I am, of course, 
aware now of everything that can be said against 
Macaulay. But even now I can look with kindness 
upon his swaggering omniscience, his two-penny op- 
timism, his unscrupulous rhetoric. He led me when 
I was half a child to Milton and Dryden and Johnson. 
But for his noble love of letters I might have been 
like those contemporary youngsters who find Paradise 
Lost dull and The Hind and the Panther stupid and 
The Lives of The Poets old-fashioned. And he gave 
scope to my imagination in the world of man and his- 
tory and with him I shared the pageantry of Olive's 
conquests and was stirred by the trial of Hastings and 
followed the campaigns of the great Frederic. My 
acquaintance with him began curiously. Our principal 
had sent me on an errand to another class-room. 
There the teacher was reading to the boys a descrip- 
tion of the black hole at Calcutta. The impression of 
that passage stayed with me for many days. Finally 
I asked a boy in that class the name of the author and 
went home and forthwith demanded that author's 
works. So on my thirteenth birthday, which was but a 
few weeks distant, my parents gave me a plain three- 
volume edition of the Essays. I was intensely happy. 
I needed nothing more that whole summer. I read the 
essays over and over again — the Addison, the Johnson, 
the Leigh Hunt — and determined to become not only 
a poet but a scholar and a man of letters. 

For a whole year the reading of Macaulay was my 
chief pleasure. I read novels, at times, of course. For 
in my boyhood, as now, I always combined desultory 
with intensive reading. And my passion for writing 
verse increased rather than diminished. But the 

[70] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

greatest revelation of my boyhood, the revelation that 
awakened me definitely to literature as a fine art, came 
during the last year of my High School course. For 
during that year we read under our admirable teacher 
the Odes of Horace. 

What first enchanted me was the poet's metrical 
systems, the nervous, sonorous Alcaic, the restrained 
pathos of the Sapphic cadences, the surge-like sweep 
and recoil of the great Archilochian measures. Was 
ever language wrought into a larger music! There 
were lines and fragments that I repeated over and 
over to myself with endless rapture: 



'Cras ingens iterabimus aequor/ 



and 



" . . . sors exitura et nos in aeternum 
exsilium impositura cymbae." 

And that other which, years later, I found had also 
evoked the wonder and delight of Stevenson: 

"aut Lacedaemonium Tarentum." 

I cared for the poet's matter too: his mellowness, 
his essential highmindedness, the sad serenity of his 
acceptance of life, his sober wisdom, the playfulness 
that is never very far from a characteristic Latin 
sense of the transitoriness of all things. But what 
influenced me most deeply was his stylistic finish and 
I absorbed into my innermost being a hundred just 
and terse and lovely phrases that I shall remember 
as long as I remember anything. I looked at my own 
verses and their flabby fatuousness made my cheeks 
burn. I swore not to write again until I had learned 

[71] 



UP STREAM 

to write, and set about learning by translating the 
odes of Horace. I knew but dimly that a host of ma- 
ture and learned writers had tried their skill upon 
my poet. I was acquainted with Milton's rendering of 
the "Quis multa gracilis," which,, with all proper 
reverence, I did not think wonderful. So I hammered 
away, quite guilelessly at my own versions. One of 
them — it was of the radiant and yet melancholy "Dif- 
fugere nives" (IV, 7.) — seemed to me not so bad. I 
put the manuscript in my pocket. But every day when 
I heard the keen voice of our teacher my courage 
failed me. At the end of weeks filled with trepidation 
and misery I handed him the folded sheet. We took 
our seats. He spread out the paper before him on the 
desk. I heard my heart beat and the blood buzz and 
hum in my ears. His face grew very red as it did 
when he was angry and my heart nearly stopped. He 
looked up and gave me one of his vivid glances. "Did 
you do that yourself ?" I could only nod. But evi- 
dently he saw the desperate sincerity in my eyes. He 
sprang up and smiled, and his smiles were very bril- 
liant. "It needs improvement here and there," he 
said. "But it's good, it's charming! You will go far 
— far!" And he read it to the class. 

I suppose we grow stolid as we grow older. Doubt- 
less, too, I was more sensitively attuned than most 
boys of fourteen. But the hours and days that fol- 
lowed this incident were such as to outweigh a good 
many of the sorrows and hungers of life. I took the 
story home to my father and mother and they were 
moved by it. For in their starved and lonely lives 
they had set all their hopes on me. And these hopes 
were liberal and fine. From that day on they shared 

[72] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

my ambition that I was to be a scholar and a man of 
letters, even though that meant a renunciation of the 
world's material prizes and rewards. 



During my last year at High School, however, a 
difficulty beset me which during hours and days made 
life seem hideous and hopeless. There arose, very 
sharply and imperiously, the consciousness of sex. By 
a degrading and stupid convention the problem of 
sex is regarded as non-existent among Anglo-Ameri- 
cans. No doubt, men tell jokes. ... So did the boys 
with whom I went to school — pointless, nasty jokes. 
But these boys, like many of my friends later, would 
have regarded a discussion of sex, the immense cen- 
tral problem of sex, as a little vulgar and more than a 
little disconcerting. And myi Americanization was 
complete. I shared that point of view or, at least, very 
potently believed that I shared it. No power on earth 
could have dragged from me a hint of my emotions. 
I attended a Methodist church. I was a member of 
the Epworth league. Naturally I soon fell into a 
wretched conviction of sin and tried to double the zeal 
of my religious exercises. Yet all my inner life was 
like a clear pool that had been muddied and denied. 
Neither prayer nor study were of much avail at cer- 
tain hours. Relentlessly my mind drifted off into 
imaginings that filled me with terror, but that seem 
to me now, as I recall them, not only harmless but 
rather poetical. I was the more convinced of the wick- 
edness of my thoughts by the absurd exaltation of 
woman which is so characteristic a note of Southern 

[73] 



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life. I had been taught by my whole social environment 
to believe that woman is a being without passion, with- 
out any feelings of the grosser sort. No one who has 
not lived in the South will credit the universality and 
blatancy of this preposterous folly. It imparts to the 
Southern gentleman a courtesy to ''good" women 
which no self-sustaining human being needs ; it makes 
his behavior to women who are not "good" literally 
currish. But these conventions had entered into the 
very texture of my life. Nothing could have persuaded 
me that I would ever have thoughts as "ungentle- 
manly" as those I have just set down. A gentleman 
believed that the South was in the right in the War 
between the States, that Christianity was the true re- 
ligion — (to be merely suspected of liberality in points 
of doctrine added a bold, mysterious charm provided 
you were a man and over fifty) — that the Democratic 
party was the only means, under Providence, of saving 
the White Race from obliteration by the Nigger, that 
good women are sexless — "sweet and pure" was the 
formula — and that in a harlot's house you must keep 
on your hat. And we were trained to be "young gen- 
tlemen." Well, the good people succeeded with me. 
I shared their faith and their morals and my boyish 
soul was tormented and warped. . . . Some years later 
with a crowd of college-boys — all pretty drunk — I went 
into a harlot's house. We came out as we had gone in. 
I had wanted hard to take my hat off. The insult 
seemed so futile and so cruel. But I didn't dare risk 
the gibes of my comrades. I was a young gentleman. 
In one respect only did I fail to achieve a complete 
conformity. It was in the matter of games. This cir- 
cumstance added, of course, to the distress of my de- 

[74] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

veloping manhood. But the games were abhorrent to 
me. Or, rather, the spirit of the games. For I loved 
the ont-of -doors and the fine exhileration of physical 
effort. But foot-ball and base-ball and basket-ball 
were all competitive — aimlessly competitive. And this 
struck me then, as it strikes me now, as incomprehen- 
sible and odious. As an experienced college professor 
I later confirmed the deliberate judgment of my boy- 
hood: competitive, inter-school or collegiate athletics 
weaken the mind by assigning purely fictitious values 
to trivialities; they rob the best of our youths of the 
joy and health of the body by setting upon that joy 
and health something akin to a horse-jockey's outlook 
and a gambler's corruption. I didn't, of course, ex- 
press these sentiments. Both at school and later at 
college I even attended the games in which our institu- 
tions were engaged. But I really could not "root." 
I did not want to be shamed before my fellows; but 
there was a point at which I couldn't bear to be shamed 
in my own eyes. 

Amid these perplexities I plunged the more ar- 
dently into my studies. Not always, not indeed gen- 
erally, into those required of me, but into my own. 
For at this time my father found it possible to become 
a member of the Queenshaven Library Society and the 
great dearth of books — no public library existed — was 
over. This dearth had hitherto been a bitter problem 
to us all. I had had to spend my tiny allowance wholly 
for books : I still treasure small editions of The Scarlet 
Letter and of Paradise Lost that I bought after a hun- 
dred deliberations, brought home with infinite keen- 
ness of delight and then tasted and absorbed with a 
high and almost austere rapture. . . . The Library 

[75] 



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Society had been founded in the eighteenth century 
and possessed an excellent stock of books. There were 
on the shelves thousands of brown leather volumes im- 
ported from England before the Revolution and in the 
early years of the Republic. A more than respectable 
array of modern books had been added. But those 
brown tomes allured me. They seemed actually to 
smell of letters and of learning. And, no doubt, on the 
theatre of my own mind I played a little of a prig's 
part. But I could have been worse employed and be- 
fore the end of the summer that followed my fifteenth 
birthday I had read the greater part of Swift and Dry- 
den, Pope and Addison, Johnson and Goldsmith. 
Swift and Johnson I reread constantly, drawing out 
the books again and again. My opinion of life was 
not high, and already I felt not wholly an alien amid 
the stark gloom of the great Dean and the gentler 
melancholy of Johnson. 

My graduation from High School approached. I 
had been an idle and sometimes a mischievous pupil 
during the middle years of my course. But during the 
last year I had retrieved everything. I graduated well 
and was permitted at our commencement to read in 
public one of my versions of Horace. The verses were 
printed in the Queenshaven Courier and prominent 
citizens noticed and praised me. Far away it all seems, 
infinitely farther even than the space of the years be- 
tween, and provincial and trivial! Yet I would en- 
grave its memory upon that which is more enduring 
than brass for the joy and hope it brought to my father 
and mother — those patient, beautiful and saddened 
souls. 

[76] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

yi 

It is clear then that, at the age of fifteen, I was an 
American, a Southerner and a Christian. My home, 
it may be urged, was foreign in spirit. But that was 
true to a very much slighter extent than may be sup- 
posed. For my father and mother were both bookish 
people and all the books they read were English. Our 
conversation, whether it turned upon these books, as it 
often did, or upon my father's business or my studies 
was all of the very texture of the civilization amid 
which we lived. My mother with that self-distrust 
which was always hers, spoke less and less of the 
memories which formed so large a part of her inner 
life. In a superficial sense I shared her joy, to be sure, 
in letters and gifts from Germany. Or, at least, I was 
happy in her happiness. For I was intensely sensitive 
to her needs and moods. My Americanization was, 
nevertheless, complete. It differed, to be quite scrup- 
ulous, from the Americanism of my comrades at school 
and college, but it differed by a touch of self -conscious- 
ness and a touch of militancy. It was at this time that, 
in my thoughts and emotions, I came upon a distinct 
and involuntary hostility to everything either Jewish 
or German. I seemed to have a premonition that, in 
some subtle way, these elements in my life and fate 
might come between me and the one thing in the world 
I cared for supremely — the poetry of the English 
tongue. 

I recall a certain Christmas. My father's employer 
had given him a present in money. And we three went 
out into the Queenshaven streets. They were ill-lit and 
there was no moon. But I remember the clear sparkle 

\77] 



UP STREAM 

of the large stars over the small, dark houses. A chill 
wind blew in from the bay, but the streets were dry 
and clean. I cannot recall what my father bought for 
my mother or for himself. But I asked for a copy of 
Tennyson. And I took home with me the Globe edition. 
I needed nothing more; my mind and my heart 
were filled. Yet I did not read many poems to the 
end. For their beauty overwhelmed me and a lump 
came into my throat and my eyes blurred. Not at the 
story or the sentiments to which, indeed, I scarcely 
attended. But at the sheer beauty of the diction and 
the versification. The May Queen and The Grand- 
mother left me cold. I was rather ashamed for Tenny- 
son that he had written them. The poems that gave 
me such unbearable keenness of delight were The 
Dying Swan, The Lotos Eaters, the Lines to Vergil! 
. . . Soon thereafter, deliberately teaching myself to 
read French for pleasure, I read for the first time 
Taine's Histoire de la litterature anglaise and was 
overcome with indignation and disgust at the famous 
parallel between Tennyson and Musset. I borrowed 
the Frenchman's verses which I understood but ill. 
Well enough, however, it seemed to me, to think his 
work almost vulgar and quite trivial compared to the 
aristocratic sweetness, the noble attitude of England's 
laureate. Could spiritual Americanization in a lad 
have gone farther? Could anyone native-born have 
held sentiments more correct with a higher passion 1 . . . 
I buried the rebellious things in me deeper and 
deeper — sex and doubt. I hated to admit the fact of 
our social isolation. Not out of snobbishness. But 
because I wished to live in harmony with the society 
of which, by virtue of its English speech and ideals, I 

[78] 



THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN 

felt myself so integral a part. So I deliberately shut 
my eyes to that exclusion which, of course, I felt far 
less keenly than my parents. I saw something of my 
comrades, I had my poetry; I took long daily walks 
with my mother, walks which I loved. For her sensi- 
tive sympathy never failed. My[ father did not care 
for verse as verse ; my schoolfellows respected my abil- 
ity without comprehending my tastes. She was my 
confident and friend. 

I spent the summer vacation that followed my grad- 
uation from High School in turning out more versions 
of Horace, in writing verses of my own and in enor- 
mous reading. I looked forward to autumn and to my 
entering college with subdued but keen happiness. I 
meant to make a name for myself at the famous old 
college and I also knew now the means by which I was 
to conquer for myself a life of learned ease and poeti- 
cal activity, and for my parents a secure and pleasant 
future. I meant to be — consider the immense irony of 
these boyish hopes and assurances — a professor of 
English literature. 



[79] 



CHAPTER IV 
The Making of an Anglo- American 



The campus of the College of Quoenshaven oc- 
cupies several city blocks. Tall trees stand in it and 
the shadows of their branches tremble in the sunshine 
upon the Grecian portico and on the warm, brown 
walls of the old building. A place of peace — gentle 
with an eighteenth century repose. There are not 
students enough for boistorousness, no bleak or snowy 
weather ever adds a touch of roughness or hardship 
to the scene. Xo engineering courses had been estab- 
lished in my time: the chair of biology was practically 
vacant. TVe strolled across the campus learning to 
smoke cigarettes or pipes, reading- our Latin or our 
English poets. Chemistry and mathematics were the 
snakes in my Paradise. I could not crush them, but 
I tried to forget their existence except during the 
actual hours of recitation and laboratory practice. 
The latter were hideous. Outside the leaves fluttered 
and the swallows wheeled and poetry sounded with her 
golden voice. And I had to potter around with noxious 
and stenchful stuffs. Of the cosmic meaning of these 
experiments no one told me a word. What I have 
learned of the problem of matter as it affects our 

[SO] 



UP STREAM 

thinking concerning man and God I have learned for 
myself. I hated having to remember how you manu- 
facture sulphuric acid or get zinc from its ore. But 
these troubles were small and transitory. If I had not 
been so long a pedagogue by trade, fiercely resentful of 
the time an uniliumJriating science-teaching steals 
from the humanities, these scars upon the memories of 
my college life would be forgotten. For that life was, 
npon the whole, hapj-ty and the sinister elements grew 
to be so only through their consequences. 

My freshman year was marked by several radical 
and fortunate changes in the college. A new presi- 
dent was called : an energetic young man, a scholar and 
a thinker; my admirable old teacher of Latin was 
transferred from the high school to our college; a 
young man was brought from a Western university 
to fill the chair of English. The last event was the 
most important of all to me. For years Ferris was 
the dominant influence in my life. He more than any 
one made me what I was during my early manhood. 
I bore him a true affection; I bear him that affection 
still. Deep, strange, silent things seemed to divide us 
for a time. But that division is over. We are to-day 
upon a firmer ground of friendship and understand- 
ing than ever before. Ferris was under thirty when 
he came to Queenshaven, but already his hair was 
completely white. His mouth was hidden under a 
drooping blond mustache ; his prominent features were 
his sensitive nose, his high, fine, narrow forehead, his 
large violet-blue eyes. A fragile, gracious, spiritually 
virile figure — a trifle slovenly, unkempt, with an 
aborbed, aloof air that would yield to a very human, 
quaintly sweet smile. He was very shy and had a 

[81] 



THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

touch of irony, in his speech. The average student 
didn't like him; to the exceptional student he came at 
once to mean much. To me — everything. I had had 
practically no instruction in English and Ferris took 
notice of me at once, of my ambition and of my talent. 
He taught me how to train myself to write ; he gave me 
generously of his time; he payed my efforts the fine 
tribute of searching criticism and merciless veracity. 
During the four years that I was his pupil I do not 
think he praised me twice. But now and then a certain 
earnestness, almost solemnity would come into his eyes 
and then I knew that I had approached my goal a little 
nearer. For I recognized in him at once a singularly 
subtle and exquisitely tempered literary intelligence. 
Delicate in health, drifting through the years down the 
warm, enervating current of Queenshaven life, he has 
done nothing. I suppose he still sits by the library 
window or in his study, playing with a reed-stemmed 
clay-pipe, savoring with that wonderful aesthetic taste 
of his the finest literature, planning a little and sink- 
ing back into his delicate Epicureanism. A stronger 
body, a rougher life, a goad of love or hunger, a little 
less consciousness of gentility — and he might have 
been a master. 

Gentility! He could not even in those years quite 
forget that his father, a professor at Washington col- 
lege, had been a friend and colleague of General Lee 
and that he was a Virginian aristocrat. His mind had 
fared forth boldly on all the quests of man ; apparently 
his intellectual flexibility* and moral freedom were 
boundless. But at the slightest translation of that 
freedom into action, were it by so much as a vivid ges- 
ture, a spiritual discomfort seized him and the gen- 

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tleman conquered the man. Since art means passion 
and since all passion has a touch of wildness, he was 
ever too much of a gentleman to be an artist. Not with 
his mind and heart, but with his unconquerable tribal 
self he always loved something else — a quiet manner, 
reserve of speech, an aristocratic nose — a little better 
than he loved truth or beauty. To illustrate the right 
humility before greatness he once told his students that 
he would have been glad to blacken Shakespeare's 
boots. He was quite sincere, but he would not have 
stood the test. The real Shakespeare — the morbid 
lover, the truant husband, the shabby actor, the poet 
whose divine energy of speech must have leant storm 
and flame to his daily discourse — that man would have 
filled Ferris with discomfort and dismay. . . . We saw 
a very great deal of each other in the course of the 
years and I know that his affection for me was very 
real. But he never, I think, quite forgave me for being 
what I am. 

My mother, with a woman's sensitiveness, had a 
perception, unreasonable but very real, of the ultimate 
truth. At home I spoke of Ferris daily during my four 
years at college. He and his influence filled my life. 
And often my mother would hint at a touch of disloy- 
alty in him to me. I always defended him hotly, and 
indeed her reasons were invariably quite wrong. But 
the sting of the situation was that I knew her to be 
in the right. In the best and deepest hours we spent 
together there was in him a shadow of withdrawal from 
me — a shadow of watchfulness, of guardedness. . . . 
A shadow, but it was there. He too must have realized 
it, must have reflected on it, for I also stood for some- 
thing in his life, and I am unwilling to believe that 

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THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

such a nature as his yielded without a struggle to the 
injustice of its tribal self. That shadow, at all events, 
is gone now and it seems hateful to record it. But 
I must do so since during many years it remained in 
my mind as the symbol of an essential isolation. 



n 



Such feelings and reflections, of course, occupied 
my mind but at occasional, comfortless moments dur- 
ing my years at college. Had I been but a shade less 
sensitive, even these moments would have been spared 
me. My true life was given over to the absorption of 
Ferris' teaching, of his intimate, unspoken, but ever 
richly implied point of view. That point of view I 
can sum up in but one word, and that word is — Eng- 
land. His attitude to the intellectual and artistic life 
of America was a little detached, a little patronizing, 
a little amused. The serious thing in American life 
to him was its continuing of those English social tra- 
ditions within our older commonwealths of which he 
was the product. But the home of his soul and of his 
imagination was by some Surrey lane or Kentish field 
or Westmoreland lake. To me, whose love of English 
poetry had been so largely an aesthetic rapture, he 
communicated those other and even richer associa- 
tions which soon blended in my inner life, as they had 
done in his, into a spiritual loyalty to England that 
was all the deeper because we were forbidden the more 
obvious loyalties granted to her children and her citi- 
zens. We were glad and proud to be the dependents 
and colonials of that mighty mother from whom came 
the song and the beauty, the traditions and the fair 

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imaginings that were the best of life to us. . . . Ferris 
knew both French and German well. But he read 
those foreign literatures with a cool and somewhat 
arrogant curiosity. And, during my boyish years, I 
absorbed that attitude as well. 

England! How should I not have loved her? I 
knew nothing of life. And there were 

The magic casements opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn — 

there that road to Canterbury along which the immor- 
tal pilgrims fared; there were the gardens and the 
learned seats where Milton studied and Gray brooded 
and Tennyson wove those early all too golden verses ; 
there was that other, lovelier city of the dreamy spires 
where Newman's voice floated through Saint Mary's 
chapel and the lad Arnold heard it and remembered it 
forever. There was that motley city of the thousand 
visions: Milton in blindness beholding the bowers of 
Paradise; Dryden at Will's coffee-house and Pope, a 
large-eyed, crooked child seeing the great, old man; 
Addison writing The Campaign in shabby lodgings; 
Johnson talking out of the depth of his noble, sombre 
heart; the fiery Hazlitt, the exquisite Lamb gathered 
about Coleridge in deep, heroic talk, and Shelley, wild- 
eyed, weaving here too the colors of his incomparable 
dreams. And far beyond the city were Windermere, 
clothed so truly to me in 

A light that never was on sea or land 
The consecration and the poet's dream, 

and, most sacred of all and most beloved — Laleham 
churchyard where Arnold sleeps. How faint these 

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fragments of that imaginative vision of England! I 
summon it before me again as it arose in my soul in 
those impressionable years in all its storied wealth, 
in all its singing splendor. No bodily eye was needed. 
I knew the whiteness of the Dover cliffs, the "league- 
long rollers'* on the Isle of Wight, the sylvan Wye 
"that wanderer through the woods," and that 

wet, bird-haunted, English lawn 

the thought of which came with a pang of beauty which 
was almost pain. What wonder that in my mind, tak- 
ing- color from my friend's, this England, this land of 
tne soul, became indissolubly one with that British 
empire which we conceived of as spreading the noble 
things we loved to the ends of the earth. We rejoiced, 
like the very children of her soil, in her "far-flung 
battle line," and like the poet she drove out and killed, 
heard with our very ears and with our very hearts 

The measured roll of English drums 
Beat at the gates of Kandahar. 

In 1898 or 1899 I read an article on Kipling in the 
Quarterly Review. I took his books from the library 
and was at once drawn into the full current of British 
imperialism. Of his verses, though I admired and imi- 
tated them, I always had a lurking, unadmitted doubt. 
But the stories took me by storm. And the best of 
them are, indeed, beyond praise in their magnificent 
concreteness, their Homeric freshness. The shallow- 
ness and meanness of the man's outlook on life were 
quite beyond my perception. I let what is surely the 
enduring part of him persuade me to accept not only 
the artist but also the politician. I heartily believed 

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THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

a Little Englander to be a fool and a contemptible 
fool; I conceived of the Boers not as obstacles to con- 
quest and rapacity but to the spreading of a heaven- 
sent light. I believed that America was, by virtue of 
our community of speech and literature with England, 
a sharer in this light which was to be forcibly shed 
upon all the dark places of the earth, and I found it 
hard to forgive William Vaughan Moody for council- 
ling us in his great Ode Written In A Time Of Hesita- 
tion to let the island men of the Philippines go free. . . . 
I found the other day, among old papers, a manuscript 
ode to England which I wrote when I was eighteen. I 
remember that Ferris praised it and, indeed, the verses 
are not without merit. But it interested me as con- 
firming so thoroughly the facts in my development 
which I have here set down. I was a Pan-Angle of 
the purest type; so was Ferris, so were my class- 
mates — lads of English and Anglicized French Hugue- 
not descent — so were the half dozen cultivated lawyers 
and business men and journalists in the community 
who, about this time, began to take an interest in me 
and in my work. All, at least, except one. But he, a 
wealthy Jewish physician who had turned Methodist 
in his boyhood, avoided all questionable subjects, 
prayed at love feasts in church and, though he sur- 
reptitiously distributed alms among the poor Jews of 
the city, achieved a complete conformity of demeanor. 
My father, furthermore, became as fervid an admirer 
of Kipling as myself. The poet's politics he scarcely 
noted, for he had not my inner reasons for a blind ad- 
herence to that faith. He did not want to be an Eng- 
lish poet. . . . Acquaintances, with a warning gravity 
of demeanor, whispered to me later that I haven't a 

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sense of what England stands for in the world. "Who 
was ever firmer in that faith? Not Eliot nor Hibben 
nor a wilderness of blood-thirsty professors. Only 
I've done a little living, a little thinking . . . especially 
a little thinking since. That grave look in my friends' 
eyes which used to impress me seems like the blank 
gravity of idiot children. . . . 



m 



I still, during these years, attended the Methodist 
church, taught Sunday School and was a leader in the 
Epworth League. I did this partly because, up to my 
junior year, my Christian faith, though cooler, was 
still unshaken, partly through the influence and friend- 
ship of the physician whom I have mentioned, but 
also because I found a good deal of unreserved human 
friendliness among these people. And I needed this. 
The relations between my class-mates and myself 
were very cordial; several of them often visited me 
as I did them. Yet there always came a point at which 
I felt excluded. They themselves belonged to a definite 
social group. They neither drew me into this group 
nor did they have the good sense or good feeling to be 
silent before me concerning these more intimate af- 
fairs. I do not think their exclusion of me was at all 
a matter of reason or determination; it was quite in- 
stinctive. By virtue of my work on the college maga- 
zine and the attitude of the professors toward me, 
they respected me. Personally they liked me well 
enough and elected me, without hesitation, in due time, 
president of our literary society and editor-in-chief 
of the magazine. As tribesmen their resistance to me 

[88] 



THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

was tacit but final. A pushing or insinuating fellow 
might, assuredly, have made his way. But my sensi- 
tiveness was so alert that I, no doubt, at times created 
division by suspecting it and at once shrinking away. 
But of the fundamental fact there could be no doubt. 
It was terribly confirmed to me by an incident in my 
senior year. I was the most prominent student on the 
campus. My classmates called themselves my friends 
— voluntarily and without my seeking. And these very 
f friends gathered to form the first chapter of a Greek 
letter fraternity at our college and — lef t me out. 1 1 did 
not know then that the fraternities do not admit Jews. 
1 1 do not know now whether they practice this exclusion 
tacitly or by regulation. I never spoke of the incident 
either at school or at home. Our president who 
founded the chapter does not know to this day that I 
so much as observed the matter. I did, with a pro- 
found discouragement, with a momentary grim pre- 
vision of the future which I fought bitterly to blot 
out lest I should lose all my hopes and see all my life 
crumble before me at eighteen. I withdrew into my- 
self with sullen pride and intensified ambition, con- 
vinced that the incident was local, exceptional, unrep- 
resentative and un-American. Such was my simple 
faith. . . . 

Gradually, too, I was losing the satisfaction that 
I had once taken in the society of my Methodist friends. 
For in my eighteenth year the world began to clear 
for me. Until then my passion for literature had been 
so exclusive that neither my reasoning power nor my 
power of observation had developed. These were now 
somewhat suddenly awakened and were the source of 
constant, sharp revelations. I remember a garden 

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party given by a bishop's widow to the young people 
of the Epworth League. It was a very charming gar- 
den with beds full of old-fashioned flowers; honey- 
suckle and clematis covered the piazza that gave on 
the lawn. There were chairs and tables and ice-cream 
and cakes were served by girls dressed in white. The 
glint of the sunlight on their smooth hair and the rus- 
tle of their starched skirts gave me a faint, sensuous 
pleasure. And one of the girls had a slow, liquid 
laugh. The young men, in duck trousers and blue 
coats, were clerks, with a sprinkling of students from 
a Methodist college. For almost the first time I lis- 
tened to the talk objectively — the kind of talk carried 
on a thousand times a day in a thousand American 
communities. It was mostly what is known as chaff, 
feeble to the point of imbecility. How could these 
people laugh at it? Laugh they did. But the laughter 
though loud was without true mirth. For that requires 
a vigor either of mind or temper that was far to seek. 
It was all witless, stale and puerile beyond conception 
— refined through sheer weakness, well-mannered and 
yet incurably ill-bred. The pastor went from table 
to table — a tall, bony, large-mouthed man. He spoke 
of the beauty of the afternoon and of the delightfulness 
of seeing young people so happy. His long, pale lips 
writhed in smiles over his jagged teeth. As he pressed 
my hand all I could think of was his fondness for 
talking about purity, and of his wife, emaciated with 
child-bearing, and their six or seven small, depressed 
children. ... A withered, eager, bead-eyed spinster 
told of a friend of hers who was a missionary in Mex- 
ico. I wondered if the Mexicans, though less hygienic 
and refined, weren't in all likelihood more interesting 

[90] 



THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

and vital than the spinster and her friend. If they were 
ignorant, it was the ignorance of a primitive folk. 
These people who held Genesis to be a scientific docu- 
ment and whined over the damnation of the heathen 
were ignorant by temperament, profession and pig- 
headedness. I couldn't tear myself away until the 
party broke up at sunset, because the girls uttered 
their inanities with such sweet lips and such pallid 
teeth. But I went home alone through the lovely dusk 
of Queenshaven and my mind recorded one of the ear- 
liest judgments that marked the passing of the boy 
into the man. 

But my growing isolation was more than compen- 
sated for by a new joy in thought — its purity and hardi- 
hood and strength. My father, wearying of my dog- 
matic assents, insisted on my reading Fiske's Cosmic 
Philosophy. I have not seen the book in years. I do 
not know what I would think of it now. But it was an 
admirable choice for an awakening intellect. I read 
it with an icy fervor. A cool, strong light seemed to 
irradiate my mind. This picture of the universe was 
so overwhelmingly and evidently nearer the truth than 
that represented by Christian doctrine that all my 
emotional forts collapsed at once. I proceeded to read 
Huxley and Darwin, Draper and Lecky. Yet I held 
very fast to my faith in God and immortality and I 
still prayed in the silences of my mind, though I could 
not have justified the habit on any intellectual basis. 
Nor did I doubt the correctness and elevation of that 
system of Christian morals under which we live. In 
a word, my attitude was that of so many thousands of 
semi-educated Americans : I was rather proud of my 
breadth of view on matters of theology and failed quite 

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to suspect my refusal to think on other matters of far 
more pressing practical import. I would have felt 
quite at home in that half way house of the mind — 
Unitarianism. And indeed, some years later, I did 
sustain a brief and tentative connection with that re- 
spectable form of faith. 



iy 



During the last two years of my college course my 
plans for the future became more definite. I ' 'ma- 
jored" in English and having taken all the courses 
the college offered, my friend Ferris gave several 
courses, both philological and literary, for me alone 
and thus enabled me to do a year's graduate work 
while I was still an undergraduate. I must emphasize 
the fact that both he and several other professors (who 
were my thorough friends) aided and encouraged me 
in every? way and clearly took it for granted that I 
would encounter no hardship in entering the aca- 
demic profession as a teacher of the English language 
and literature. My father and mother were also well 
content with my plan; their German respect for the 
dignity and authority of the academic life increased 
their satisfaction. 

I can say frankly — since my present self is so far 
removed from that old, boyish self in Queenshaven 
with its deep faith and ardor — that I prepared myself 
for my chosen calling in no common way. I read Eng- 
lish literature with a white heat of passion; the lamp 
in my bed-room burned drv night after night. By 
the time I was nineteen I had read and re-read and 
pondered all the great things in English literature 

[92] 



THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

from Chaucer to Kipling, and I had read many authors 
of the second and third rank — Jonson and Donne, Mar- 
veil and Crashaw, Herrick and Vaughan, Prior and 
Gay and Tickell, Collins and Smart, Crabbe and Cow- 
per and Hogg, even Bowles and Lloyd, Patmore and 
Frederick Tennyson, Clough and Beddoes and Locker- 
Lampson down to Lang and Austin Dobson and, of 
course, the immediate contemporaries. Yet these 
names are but a few and written down at random. The 
works of the great poets, even of those who like Lan- 
dor are aside from the beaten road, had entered into 
my very being. ... I have had little time to read 
English poetry of late years. I do not need to. I 
dip into my memory and those immortal numbers 
sound upon my inner ear! The early books and the 
seventh of Paradise Lost, the Epistle to Augustus, 
Adonais and the Nightingale Ode, Kubla Kahn and 
Work Without Hope, Tintern Abbey and the Ode and 
the Sonnets, The Lotos-Eaters and Ulysses, The Last 
Ride Together and A Grammarian's Funeral, Thyrsis 
and The Scholar Gypsy, The Blessed Damozel and 
Jenny, A Forsaken Garden and the elegy on Baude- 
laire and the long, dreamy, murmuring melodies — like 
the wash of a summer sea — of The Earthly Paradise. 
... In prose I was not so well grounded. But I knew 
the greater prosemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries, especially my old favorites Swift and John- 
son, and the object of my latest and deepest enthusiasm 
in college, Matthew Arnold, reasonably well and the 
novelists from Fielding to George Eliot intimately. 
And I had read all the histories of English literature 
available and dozens of volumes of critical essays and 
most of the chief biographies from Boswell to Lord 

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Tennyson's life of his father. Once, when my eyes 
were being treated, my mother read to me the whole 
of Dowden's Shelley and of Trevelyan's Macaulay. . . . 
I have mentioned Matthew Arnold. My father dis- 
covered the volume containing Culture and Anarchy 
and Friendship's Garland and urged me to read it. I 
felt the impact of a kindred mind and the book became 
one of my deepest experiences, although its full import 
was revealed to me only years later. I read all of 
Arnold over and over again and I still think him the 
clearest-souled Englishman of his century. And finally 
there came — as was inevitable — Pater and Stevenson 
as the last word in that other great art of prose which 
I now took almost as seriously as the greater art of 
verse. I took delight in the tales of Stevenson. But it 
was characteristic of my youth and its environment 
that his essays seemed to me not only charmingly 
written — (they are, though with too obvious a display 
of dexterity) — but wonderfully rich in wisdom. . . . Re- 
cently, at odd moments of leisure, I have been reading 
Hazlitt again. Almost more than any other English 
writer he gives, in a voice so little muffled by the grave 
as almost to ring in one's ears, the deep sense of the 
texture and savor, the stir and pang of life. Regret 
and longing, the glory and the disillusion — what poet 
has rendered them with a more piercing note f Withal 
his voice is always manly, direct, tempered by some 
tonic quality within. In my college days I preferred 
Stevenson. I did not see that Stevenson paints life 
and feeling in but a few colors. These are bright and 
very engaging and delicately used. But they fill in a 
pattern quite arbitrary and unreal. The sentiments 

[94] 



THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

and ideals correspond to no well-considered vision of 
the world. They are like the pipings of some splendid 
bird in a world all dawn — a world that will never know 
the heat of noon with its ardor of passion and pain or 
the dark of night with its contemplation and its falter- 
ing hope. . . . 

Meanwhile I read both verse and prose, not yielding 
blindly to the easy and abundant inspiration of youth, 
but curbing that inspiration and guiding it with severe 
and fastidious care. The uncriticalness of Southern 
culture confirmed me in demanding the utmost ex- 
actions of myself. There was a terrible lot of facile 
and amorphous talking and writing. An eighteenth- 
centuryish type of oratory still throve in Queenshaven. 
Whenever its echo reached me I re-read Gautier's 
stanzas on art and tightened the girdle about my loins. 

I have recently looked at some thousands of manu- 
script verses of that period. The poems are full of a 
rhythmic ardor, yet never without restraint. There 
are good lines and happy turns of expression and there 
is no lack of imagination. Yet the stuff is quite worth- 
less. For it is merely, as Arthur Symons wrote me 
years later (not of my own work) "poetizing about 
the old subjects in as nearly as possible the old way." 
There is no directness of speech because there was, 
after all, no directness of vision. It is all remote and 
unreal. Mere " literature" in the sense of Verlaine. 
Without the learned renaissance tradition of English 
poetry from Surrey to Swinburne the verses were un- 
thinkable. With that tradition and its results extant 
they were superfluous. But they illustrate how I lived 
and moved and had my being in the cultural tradition 

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of the Anglo-Saxon aristocrat. I was of those who 
" speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke, the faith 
and morals hold that Milton held" . . . 

v. 

Does all that sound priggish? It was saved from 
priggishness, I believe, by its passion, by its inevitable- 
ness. There was no blemish of worldly ambition in it 
all. I thirsted to know, I hungered to create. But I 
had, all during my sophomore and junior years, an- 
other preoccupation, a humbler and, perhaps, a more 
human one. There was a girl ... I saw her one day 
at Sunday School. I met her that week at the Epworth 
League. Straightway something within me began to 
ache with a very definite, small, sharp, insistent ache. 
For two years I had to study very hard or write very 
feverishly to deaden that pain. Eeason and self -per- 
suasion were quite powerless against it. Love at first 
sight: a very powerful instinct of sexual selection. 
Each phrase expresses half of the intense reality. The 
girl was short and rather plump, she had a skin of fine 
texture, small, white, mouse-like teeth, pale, brown 
hair, good eyes of grey with long lashes, but a small, 
prim, cool mouth. She wasn't pretty. Heaven knows 
she wasn't clever. Her mother and her older sister 
illustrated with deadly precision what she was certain 
to become. And I saw all this and nursed no illusions 
and yet a smile from her would ease me for a day and 
failure to see her would throw me into helpless agony. 
I was intensely jealous of her, though I knew her to be 
quite innocent, not even given to flirting, and though 
she was obviously anxious to give me every encourage- 

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THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

ment permitted by a very strict maidenly propriety. 
What was that chilly preference to my fever and my 
pain? This experience aroused in me, even in the midst 
of my suffering, my earliest reflections — vague and in- 
conclusive and rendered futile, of course, by my gentle- 
manly conservatism — on a tremendous problem. If by 
any queer and unthinkable chance I could have married 
the girl, I would have done so — young and penniless 
and helpless as I was. The knowledge that such a step 
would have ruined me would not have deterred me for 
a moment. I wanted her so! It was a good thing, 
then, that society and custom and parental authority 
made such a step impossible. On the other hand, it 
seemed a raw cruelty that the passion of love at its 
freshest and most vigorous should be a festering spear 
in the flesh of youth. What a problem ! What a world ! 
... At the end of the second year I succeeded, by the 
severest self -discipline, in freeing myself measurably 
from this torment. I deliberately went out a good deal 
with a vivid little beauty in whom a quiver of passion 
constantly fought against but never overcame reserve 
and principle. She was worth a dozen of the other 
kind. Yet until I left college I had to avoid that fatal 
girl with the round shoulders and the dreary mouth 
lest I should feel again the old, miserable, sickening 
ache. I marvel how with that scourge upon me I 
could work so very intensely and continuously. But, 
though I had next to no worldly ambition, I was 
anxious to get through college. 

I had a deep and urgent motive. I began to see how 
the Queenshaven life was gradually telling on my 
father and mother. To my love of them was added a 
compassion that shook me to the roots of my being and 

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a deadly fear that in my race against time and circum- 
stance, my race for their welfare and their future, I 
might arrive too late. I began to perceive objectively 
how the meanness and the humiliations of my father's 
business were beginning to shake his judgment and 
to exasperate his moods ; how solitariness and repres- 
sion were whitening my mother's hair. Her face re- 
tained its girlish bloom and freshness almost to the 
threshold of old age. She had hardly a wrinkle when 
she died. But during my years at college her hair 
turned quite white and my old terror for her became 
intensified. 

But I must not give the impression that our home 
life was altogether gloomy. After all we had one an- 
other and there were many cheerful hours and days. 
"We were poor but never to the point of penury. A fine 
care and wise frugality, especially characteristic of 
my mother, made the modest income suffice for all de- 
cent necessities and my studies and development were 
not interrupted by any material cares. I sometimes 
thought our diet monotonous. I didn't always like my 
clothes. But essentially my indifference to such things 
was quite serene. My father and mother, moreover, 
were full of hope. My progress was obvious; my 
teachers constantly impressed upon them the belief 
that I had an enviable future before me. I had, too, 
an excellent friend on the Queenshaven Courier, a 
clever man, almost my father's age, who reprinted my 
verses in the paper, got me to write articles and book- 
reviews and so, almost insensibly, I became quite a 
figure in that small, compact community. . . . How 
little that meant, how in spite of fair seeming and fair 

[98] 



THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

speech all forces were arrayed against me, I did not 
know until several years had passed. . . . 

I recall a moonlit, starry night in May. My father 
had gone to a lodge meeting. My mother and I paced 
the piazza together, as was our wont. It was a few 
weeks before my graduation. We spoke long and 
quietly of the past and of the future — of my hopes 
which seemed well-justified, of the important day that 
was coming. We both went to rest, I know, with a real 
serenity; of soul. . . . More than once later she re- 
called that evening to me and asked me whether I 
remembered it. Remember it ! I shall see those stars 
and the shadows on the verandah and her eyes in the 
dusk until I see nothing more forever. But the last 
time she asked me I feigned f orgetfulness. I was be- 
yond all speech. For the hopes had gone down in 
shame and frustration and on her face was the mark 
of death. . . . 

VI. 

My graduation was made a notable event in our 
small circles. All the leading citizens of the town are 
alumni of the college and are proud of its work and 
its traditions. So they had followed my writings in the 
magazine and in the papers, and when I took two de- 
grees and delivered a commencement oration which, 
for once, made some concessions in manner to the more 
florid type of Southern oratory, they had a moment of 
enthusiasm over me. This enthusiasm was shared by 
the press of Queenshaven and by my class-mates. I 
was a bit more of a hero than the youth who wins a 
series of important foot-ball games for his university. 
It was a very great day for me and an even greater 

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UP STREAM 

day for my parents : the happiest they had known in 
years, the happiest they were ever to know again. 
Under the influence of this wave of communal approba- 
tion a board of Episcopal clergymen elected me to the 
chair of English in a local academy. But the aged 
clergyman to whom the school really belonged arose 
from a bed of illness and removed the trustees he had 
himself appointed for electing a person distasteful to 
him. He used this expression quite openly in a letter 
to the Courier. The gentlemen on the board, however, 
wrote me apologetic letters and my friends and parents 
agreed that it wasn't, after all, my ambition to teach 
in a denominational school. Besides, I was only just 
nineteen and the world seemed all before me where to 
choose. . . . By Ferris ' advice I registered in several 
teachers' agencies and sent my master's thesis to a 
scholarly journal by which it was duly accepted for 
publication. 

The long summer weeks dragged on and nothing 
happened. One New England teachers' agency did, 
indeed, suggest a place or two but nothing came of my 
applications. Ferris assured me by letter that this 
lack of success was due to my youth and inexperience. 
Since he had councilled me from the first to apply for 
a fellowship or scholarship in one of the large grad- 
uate schools of the east, I accepted his explanation for 
these happenings as well as for other experiences that 
came when I applied for school positions within the 
state. His advice was that I should stay at home for 
a year, pursue my studies and write a few more schol- 
arly papers to submit with my fellowship applications 
the following spring. My father, ever the soul of un- 
worldliness in money matters, agreed heartily to this 

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THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

plan and my mother was glad that she could have me 
with her for another year. 

That year stands out in my memory as a pleasant 
one. I saw little of any one except Ferris, but I was 
quite free to devote myself to the cultivation of my 
tastes. And I wrote my first extensive piece of work : 
an essay in biography and criticism about fifty thou- 
sands words in length. Ferris pronounced it well- 
grounded and well-written— a notable piece of work 
for a mere youth. So when April came I applied for 
fellowships at Harvard and Columbia and both Ferris 
and I were hopeful of the results. From both univer- 
sities, however, I received only pleasant acknowledge- 
ments of the work I had sent in support of my appli- 
cations, an invitation to pursue my graduate studies 
and regrets that neither a fellowship nor a scholarship 
were available. This was a hard blow. It was obvious 
that I could not go on living on my father's kindness. 
On the contrary, I was passionately anxious to help 
him and my mother to free themselves from the bonds 
of their Queenshaven life. I did not speak of this, for 
I did not want to render their consciousness of it more 
acute. But it weighed on me heavily. I thought and 
thought and came to a resolve which many American 
youths take lightly enough, but which cost me infinite 
hesitation and pain : I would borrow money. The notion 
of working my way through the graduate course never 
occurred to me. For I was not concerned with text- 
books or, primarily, with degrees, but with a life to be 
lived, an absorption and dedication to be accomplished. 
And this never presented itself to my mind as possible 
upon any terms but those of a complete release from 
sordid preoccupations. 

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UP STREAM 

Unhappily for me the wealthy Jewish physician of 
my Methodist days had recently died. Had he been 
alive my way would have been easier. I felt close to 
him and he was kind and generous. As it was, I had 
to go to other prominent citizens and alumni of the 
college. These men had all liked me and made much 
of me for years ; I felt quite at home with them in all 
essential matters and yet it was a terrible struggle. I 
put off my errand from day to day; I went to the door 
of some office and hadn't the courage to enter. A sen- 
sation of physical nausea and of burning shame over 
whelmed me. ... I have never been able to feel dif- 
ferently. If I must ask for something, however clear 
my right to make the demand or the request, the old, 
sickening misery comes over me and I am helpless, 
stupid, stammering, absurd. For the sake of others 
I have had to ask things since then. For myself I 
would never have the strength to face that sense of 
spiritual nakedness and abasement. Perhaps it is from 
this native feeling that there has grown my passion for 
justice. The more just we are to our fellowmen, the 
less need we wound and degrade them with our 
wretched mercy. True justice — I do not mean the 
tribal terrors or capitalistic voracities of our legal and 
moral codes — true justice need not be tempered by 
mercy. It excludes the necessity for mercy. You do 
not need to be merciful until you have ceased to be 
just. . .! 

The Queenshaven gentlemen, it is but fair to add, 

made my dreadful task comparatively easy. Several 

of them met to discuss the matter and made up for me 

a loan of three hundred and fifty dollars. I had really 

wanted six hundred to see me through the year at 

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THE MAKING OF AN ANGLO-AMERICAN 

Columbia, since the tuition alone was a hundred and 
fifty. But wild horses, in the vivid old phrase, could 
have dragged no further begging from my lips. I 
thanked them with what grace I could master and 
proceeded to get ready for my great adventure. 

Let any one who has an unclouded vision of our 
American life, and not least of the academic part of 
it, consider my undertaking. How often since have I 
reflected on it, sometimes in a mood of bitterness, 
sometimes in one of irony. I had lived utterly for the 
things of the mind and the emotions. I was twenty 
years old and knew less of practical matters than many 
a child of ten. I had no social adroitness but the most 
quivering sensitiveness and pride. I was passionately 
Anglo-American in all my sympathies, I wanted above 
all things to be a poet in the English tongue, and my 
name and physiognomy were characteristically Jewish. 
I had ill-cut, provincial clothes and just money enough 
to get through one semester. Such was my inner and 
outer equipment for pursuing in a metropolitan grad- 
uate school the course which was to lead to a college 
appointment to teach English. No one warned me, no 
one discouraged me. It seems incredible that Ferris 
had no inkling of the quality of my undertaking. But 
he, too, kept silent. So I faced the future with a steady 
hopefulness. Only when I sought to grasp what sepa- 
ration from my mother would mean to her and me did 
my heart sink. We tried to comfort each other, she 
and I, by dwelling upon the certainty of a successful 
career for myself. But during the last days we gave 
up these feeble and hollow efforts and fell quite silent 
before our unavertible fate. 

[103] 



CHAPTER V. 

The American Discovers Exile. 

i. 

In those days the steamers from the South landed 
at piers on the North River. I was too deeply pre- 
occupied with that first, tremendous, lonely plunge into 
the world to watch the harbor or the sky-line of New 
York. I stood on deck, grasping my valise tightly, 
holding my hat. The sharp wind was full of scurries 
of rain. It was almost dark when we passengers 
trickled across the plank into the appalling mud of 
the streets. The lower West side is, I still think, the 
dismallest port of the city. On that day, coming from 
the bland and familiar South and from a life that 
touched reality so feebly, it seemed brutal, ferocious, 
stark. . . . An indifferent acquaintance met me and 
hustled me to the nearest station of the Ninth Avenue 
"L." We climbed the iron staircase, scrambled for 
tickets and were jammed into a car. It was the evening 
rush hour and we had barely standing room. The 
train rattled on its way to Harlem. At One Hundred 
and Sixteenth Street we slid down in the elevator to 
the street, frantically dodged people and vehicles 
across Eighth Avenue, turned south and west and 
stood presently before one of a row of three story 

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THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

houses wedged in between huge, dark buildings. My 
guide introduced me to the boarding-house keeper, a 
hard-featured, heavily rouged woman who seemed in 
pain and in a hurry. They led me to a hall bedroom 
on the third floor, lit a whirring gas-jet and, in another 
minute, were gone. I put down my valise and took off 
my overcoat and stood still, quite still, between the 
bed-room and the chiffonier. I could touch one with 
either hand. I was in New York. I was alone. 

At such moments one's intentions to conquer the 
world avail little. Especially if one is twenty. I heard 
the far away roar of New York like the roar of a sin- 
ister and soulless machine that drags men in and 
crunches them between its implacable wheels. It 
seemed to me that I would never be able to face it. I 
huddled in that small, cold room in an old traveling 
robe of my ; father's and bit my lips. But I had the 
manhood not to write home in that mood. Indeed my 
old stoicism had not deserted me and my parents never 
learned of the grinding misery of my first weeks in 
New York. 

In the morning the October sun shone. At breakfast 
the landlady seemed not nearly so menacing. I may 
add at once that she was an intelligent and courageous 
woman who had suffered much and undeservedly 
and that we became great friends. She gave me on 
that first day what simple directions I needed. I left 
the house, walked to the corner and turned my face 
toward the west. Morningside Heights with its many 
poplars rose sheer against a sparkling autumn sky. 
The beauty of it seemed much colder to me that day 
than it does now. But it was beauty — something to 
dwell with, to calm and to console the mind. I took 

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UP STREAM 

heart at once and climbed the heights and presently 
came npon the approach to the University library. 
The river shone still farther to the west, with the 
russet palisades beyond. But I hastened across the 
quadrangle, eager for some human contact in this new 
world full of cold power and forbidding brilliance. 

Professor Brent of the department of English, with 
whom I had had some correspondence, received me 
with a winning kindliness. We had a talk the other 
day and I observed him and remembered the old days. 
He has grown grayer. Otherwise he is the same — the 
lank, unathletic but not graceless form, the oblong head 
lengthened by a pointed beard, the pleasant, humorous 
but powerful glance, the easy pose, tilted back in his 
chair, the eternal cigarette between his long, bony, 
sensitive fingers. A scholarly and poetic figure, 
languid enough, but capable of a steady tenacity at the 
urge of some noble passion of the mind. That he was 
a trenchant and intrepid thinker I always knew. How 
magnificently he would stand the ultimate intellectual 
test of this, or perhaps, any age, I was to learn much 
later. . . . He introduced me to Brewer, secretary of 
the department, a pale, hesitant, chill-eyed New Eng- 
lander with a thin strain of rhetorical skill and literary 
taste. 

German was to be my second "minor", largely be- 
cause it would be easy and would give me more time 
for my English studies. And so I went to present 
myself to Professor Richard who had also written 
me a pleasant letter. I found him tall, erect, frugal 
and incisive of speech, a spirit of great rectitude, of a 
purity almost too intense to grasp the concrete forces 
and passions of the fevered world; clear, high-souled, 

[106] 



THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

a little passionless, but all that without effort or prig- 
ishness. His intellectual and artistic sympathies were, 
of course, limited. But within its limits his was an 
admirable and a manly mind. 

The qualities of Brent and Richard did not, of 
course, reveal themselves to me at once. Nor, indeed, 
for long thereafter and then in private interviews and 
at club-meetings. The lectures of these excellent pro- 
fessors were dull and dispiriting to me. I found in 
them no living sustenance of any sort. For years I 
sought to grasp the reasons for this fact. I do not 
think I grasped them wholly until I myself began to 
lecture to graduate students and to have such students 
in my own seminar. I came to the university with the 
reading I have described. I knew all the books that 
one was required to know in the various lecture 
courses. What I wanted was ideas, interpretative, 
critical, aesthetic, philosophical, with which to vivify, 
to organize, to deepen my knowledge, on which to nour- 
ish and develop my intellectual self. And my friends, 
the professors, ladled out information. Poor men, how 
could they help it? I thought in those days that all 
graduate students knew what I and a small group of 
my friends knew. I am aware now of the literally in- 
credible ignorance of the average bachelors of our 
colleges. ... I cannot, of course, absolve the profes- 
sors entirely, though only the rigorous veracity that 
gives its meaning to this narrative can force me to 
admit even so much of friends who have stood by me 
so long and so wholeheartedly as Brent and Richard. 
They did not give themselves enough, nor freely 
enough. They did not realize that, the elementary 
tools of knowledge once gained, there is but one thing 

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that can teach men and that is the play of a large and 
an incisive personality. In a word, I was an ardent 
disciple and I found no master. So I drifted and occa- 
sionally "cut" lectures and wrote my reports and 
passed creditable examinations without doing a page 
of the required reading. I had done it all ! I read for 
myself in entirely new directions — books that changed 
the whole tenor of my inner life — and struggled to 
make a living and wrote verses and walked and talked 
and sat in bar-rooms and cheap eating-houses with my 
friend Ellard — my friend of friends, whom I found 
at this time and who is still animae dimidium meae. 



n. 



It was a grey, windy November forenoon that we 
first talked on the steps of Fayerwether Hall. He was 
tall and lank and thin to emaciation. An almost 
ragged overcoat fluttered behind him, a shapeless, dis- 
colored hat tilted a little on his head. His delicate 
nostrils seemed always about to quiver, his lips to be 
set in a half-petulant, half-scornful determination. 
From under the hat shone two of the most eloquent 
eyes — fiery and penetrating, gloomy and full of 
laughter in turn — that were ever set in a human head. 
He spoke with large, loose, expressive gestures and 
with a strange, abrupt way of ending his sentences. 
I felt drawn to him at once. Freedom and nobility 
seemed to clothe him and a stoic wildness. A young 
eagle with plumage ruffled by the storm. . . . ! I 
asked him, I don't know why, whether he wrote verse. 
And when he said that he did I knew instinctively that 
his verses were better than mine, far better, and curi- 

[108] 



THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

ously enough I was not sorry but glad and, in a way, 
elated. I cannot tell at this distance of time how rap- 
idly our friendship ripened, but I know that we soon 
saw a great deal of each other. 

He lived in a small, crowded room up four flights of 
stairs. A large kerosene lamp stood on his study 
table. A sharp, triangular shadow lay steadily across 
bed and wall. He was tormented by poverty and love 
and by the intellectual bleakness that was all about us. 
For two years he had been at Bonn and though by 
blood a New England Brahmin of the purest strain, 
the sunny comradeship and spiritual freedom of the 
Ehineland city had entered into his very being. I see 
him standing there in the blue cloud of our cigarette- 
smoke chanting me his verses. I had never met a poet 
before and poetry meant everything to me in those 
days. A lovely or a noble line, a sonorous or a troub- 
ling turn of rhythm could enchant me for days. So 
that I was wholly carried away by my friend and his 
poems. And we both felt ourselves to be in some sort 
exiles and wandered the streets as the fall deepened 
into winter, engaged in infinite talk. We watched as 
evening came the bursting of the fiery blooms of light 
over the city and again, late at night, met in some eat- 
ing house or bar-room on Amsterdam Avenue where 
the belated, frozen car men watched us with heavy curi- 
osity. We found ourselves then, as we have found 
ourselves ever since, in complete harmony as to the 
deeper things in life. That that harmony has become, 
if anything, more entire during the past seven crucial 
years of the world's history, I account as one of the 
few sustaining factors in my life and to it I attach, not 
foolishly I think, an almost mystical significance. . . . 

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UP STREAM 

I have been re-reading his poetry. I can detach it 
quite coldly now from the romance of our early com- 
madeship, from the comforts of our maturer friend- 
ship. Nor am I as easily stirred as I was once. It is 
inferior to no poetry that has been written on this 
continent. At its best it is at least equal to the noblest 
passages of Emerson and it is far less fragmentary, 
far more sustained upon an extraordinary level of in- 
tellectual incisiveness, moral freedom and untradi- 
tional beauty. And there are many lines and passages 
that in their imagination and passion and wisdom 
cleave so deeply to the tragic core of life that they 
might bring tears to the eyes of grave and disillusioned 
men. . . . What has it availed him? His volumes 
scarcely sell; the manuscript of his third one is being 
hawked about from publisher to publisher. His verse 
is handicapped by its intellectual severity and its dis- 
dain of fashion — the poetic fashion of either yesterday 
or to-day. But it has the accent of greatness and that 
is bound to tell in the long run. 

Other friendships there were for me at the univer- 
sity, pleasant enough at that time, but all impermanent 
save one more. I still count George Fredericks, sober- 
minded, virile, generous, among my chosen comrades. 
And I still think, with much kindness, of G-. now a col- 
lege professor in the East, a fine, pure spirit, a New 
Englander like Ellard, but unlike him striving quite in 
vain to transcend the moral and intellectual parochial- 
ism of his section and his blood. But, indeed, I sought 
no companionship, taking only such as came my way. 
For mean anxieties soon beset me as my slender bor- 
rowings came to an end and I tramped the streets in 
search of tutoring. A crowd of queer and colorful and 

[110] 



THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

comic scenes — sorrowful and humiliating enough at 
that time — floats into my mind. In a gorgeous palace 
near Central Park the footman eyed me contemptu- 
ously and an elderly woman tried to hire me to con- 
duct her evidently rowdy boys to and from school. I 
refused curtly to do a nurse-maid's work. But walking 
across the rich carpet to the door I heard my torn 
shoes make a squdgy sound and almost repented. In 
another elaborate establishment I gave, in a very 
ready-made Louis XV room a single lesson to the 
young daughter of the house. Next day a note came 
dispensing with my services. I wasn't surprised. The 
girl was pretty and I was hungry for charm and love 
and she had evidently not disliked me. ... At last I 
got a couple of boys to tutor (one a deaf-mute) and 
lessons in scientific German to give to the staff of one 
of the city institutions. Two evenings a week I was 
ferried across Hell's Gate in the icy wind to give this 
instruction. It was a bleak and tiresome business, but 
it payed room and board and tobacco and an occa- 
sional glass of beer. 

Meanwhile I read the nights away. Fascinating 
hints had come to me in Queenshaven, despite my 
whole-souled absorption in English literature, of cer- 
tain modern German plays and poems and novels 
which seemed, by all reports, to differ wonderfully 
from both Schiller and Heine, the two German poets 
whom I knew best, and also from such popular mid- 
century writers as Scheffel and Heyse. But very few 
German books ever made their way to Queenshaven. 

[Ill] 



UP STREAM 

Here, in the University library, I found them all and I 
read them all. 

I read them with joy, with a sense of liberation, 
with a feeling that no other books in the world had 
ever given me. I struggled against that feeling; I 
seemed to myself almost disloyal to the modern Eng- 
lish masters, to the very speech that I loved and which 
I hoped to write notably some day. But a conviction 
came upon me after some months with irresistible 
force. All or nearly all English books since Fielding 
were literature. This was life. All or nearly all the 
English literature by which our generation lives is, 
in substance, rigidly bounded within certain intellec- 
tual and ethical categories. This was freedom. I now 
understood my old, instinctive love for the prosemen 
of the eighteenth century. They had the sense for life 
— a life remote from ours, to be sure — but their sense 
of it was manly and incorruptible. In Wordsworth 
and in Tennyson I found substantially the same ele- 
vated sentiments. Except in the narrow field of the 
religious emotions, they and their contemporaries had 
no sense for reality at all, only for pseudo-nobility. 
And in English fiction, in 1904, all the people really 
held the same elevated sentiments, sentiments which 
were mostly false and unnecessary, and of course 
couldn't and didn't live up to them. They were all 
like poor Byron who half believed that one ought to 
be a Christian and a church-going householder and 
who was romantically desperate over his own wicked 
nature. Or they were like the slim, pale-eyed son of 
my old Sunday school superintendent. The lad had 
an excellent tenor voice and joined a small opera com- 
pany. On one of his visits home he said to me with a 

[112] 



THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

troubled look in his eyes: "I don't see why I should 
be this way. My father's such a good man." ... Of 
course I'm stating the case crassly and unjustly as one 
always does and must for the sake of emphasis. And, 
of course, I shall be held, whatever I say, to be approv- 
ing a drifting with the passions of human life — like 
that of Burns — instead of an understanding and use 
and mastery of them. But it will not be denied by any 
really honest and penetrating thinker that English 
literature from Fielding until quite recently was curi- 
ously remote from life, curiously helpless and unhelp- 
ful and yet arrogant in the face of it. Such books as 
Moore's Esther Waters, which I hadn't read, and 
Wells' The Passionate Friends, which hadn't yet been 
written, have introduced into English letters an en- 
tirely new element of spiritual veracity and moral 
freedom. And these were the qualities which I found 
so pervasively and overwhelmingly present (yet with 
no lack of beauty and music in structure and style) 
in modern German literature. If in these books there 
was a noble sentiment it was there because it had 
grown inevitably from the sweat and tears, the yearn- 
ing and the aspiration of our mortal fate — it was never 
set down because it was a correct sentiment to which 
human nature must be made to conform. I understood 
very fully now the saying of that character in one of 
Henry James' stories: "When I read a novel, it's 
usually a French one. You get so much more life for 
your money." I read French books, too. But compared 
to the German ones they seemed, as they are, rather 
hard and monotonous and lacking in spiritual delicacy. 
. . . Someone gave me a copy of Hans Benzmann's an- 
thology of the modern German lyric. I found there an 

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immediate rendering of life into art, not mere isolated 
elements of it selected according to a tradition of 
pseudo-nobility and then fixed in the forms of post- 
Renaissance culture. The pangs and aspirations of 
my own heart — and of all hearts, if men would but be 
honest among us — were here, the haunting echoes of 
my inner life, the deep things, the true things of which 
I had been ashamed and which I had tried to transmute 
into the correct sentiments of my Anglo-American en- 
vironment — I found them all in the lyrical charm of 
these poets, in their music, which is the very music of 
the mind, in their words, which are the very words of 
life. They spoke my thoughts, they felt my conflicts ; 
they dared to be themselves — these modern men and 
women who were impassioned and troubled like myself, 
who had not snared the universe in barren furmulae, 
but who were seekers and strivers ! They didn't know 
the whole duty of man ; they didn't try to huddle out of 
sight the eternal things that make us what we are ; they 
hadn't reduced the moral and spiritual life of the race 
to a series of gestures of more that Egyptian rigidity. 
They made me free ; they set me on the road of trying 
to be not what was thought correct without reference 
to reality, but what I was naturally meant to be. They 
taught me, not directly, but by the luminous implica- 
tions of their works, the complete spiritual unveracity 
in which I had been living and in which most of my 
Anglo-American friends seemed to be living. . . . 
This whole process was, of course, very gradual on its 
practical or outer side. Within me, too, the old ready- 
made formulae would often arise to inhibit or torment 
me. And from this conflict and turbidness of feeling 
and vision there sprang some grave errors of action. 

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THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

But that was because my freedom was not yet a 
rational freedom, nor one corrected by a power of 
rational experience. My youth had been passed amid 
so much falseness that my mastery of fact was quite 
inadequate for the practice of a real moral freedom. 
I had no way at all of seeing things as they really are, 
no power of measuring the origin and direction of the 
forces that rule men and the world. I was like some- 
one to whom is offered the freedom of a great library, 
but who had been deliberately mistaught the meaning 
of the symbols in which the books are written. I knew 
that it was my duty now to read for myself. I didn't 
know how to read. I am struggling to express a diffi- 
cult and momentous truth : The young creators of new 
values come to grief so often not because their values 
are wrong, nor because their rebellion is not of the very 
breath of the world's better life. They come to grief 
because they have no mastery of fact, because they 
carry with them the false old interpretations and con- 
ventional idealizations of man, and nature, and human 
life. . . . Nevertheless the world now opened itself to 
me in a new guise. I had been accustomed, as I had 
been taught, to approve and to disapprove. Now for 
the first time I watched life honestly and lost myself 
in it and became part of it with my soul and my sympa- 
thies, detached only in the citadel of the analytic and 
recording, never more of the judging mind. I became 
aware of faces — the faces of people on the streets, in 
the cars, in the subway. And I no longer thought of 
people as good and bad or desirable or undesirable, 
but I saw in all faces the struggle and the passion and 
the sorrow, sometimes ugly, unheroic enough always 

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UP STREAM 

by the old, foolish tests, but full of endless fascina- 
tion. . . . 

To a modern Continental, French or German or 
Italian, this whole matter will seem primitive and 
absurd. He may be sure that I am touching on the 
central weakness of the Anglo-American mind — its 
moral illusionism. That mind is generally quite 
sincere. It really arranges its own impulses and the 
impulses of other men in a rigid hierarchy of fixed 
norms. It has surrendered the right and the power 
of examining the contents of such concepts as " right,' 9 
"wrong," "pure," "democracy," "liberty," "prog- 
ress," or of bringing these conventionalized gestures 
of the mind to the test of experience. It has not, in- 
deed, ever naively experienced anything. For it holds 
the examination of an experience in itself, and with- 
out reference to an anterior and quite rigid norm to be 
a "sin." It hides the edges of the sea of life with a 
board-walk of ethical concepts and sits there, hoping 
that no one will hear the thunder of the surf of human 
passions on thei rocks below. . . . 

IV 

A face, a voice, a gesture that seemed strange and 
unheard of arose before me and I was stricken by a 
blind and morbid passion. All the repressions of my 
tormented adolescence, all the false inhibitions in 
thought and deed now went toward the nourishing of 
this hectic bloom. It was winter. A white and silent 
winter. Playing with curious fancies we called our 
passion roses in the snow. I committed every extrava- 
gance and every folly. I knew nothing of life, nothing 

[116] 



THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

of human nature. I knew ethical formulae which, obvi- 
ously, didn't apply — that were, at best, vicious half- 
truths. Thus all the defences of my soul broke down. 
I had never been taught a sane self-direction. The 
repetition of tribal charms which were quite external 
had been deemed a sufficient safeguard. Happily, 
though my passion was morbid enough and caused me 
untold suffering, it was blended with the love of letters 
and with a keen though unwholesome romance. There 
was nothing in it of baseness, nothing of degradation. 
I am not proud of it but I am not ashamed of it. I 
look back upon it and it blends, in strange tones, into 
the inevitable music of life — neither good nor evil, 
neither right nor wrong. We are both married now 
and meet in pleasant friendship and remember half- 
humorously that long ago — so long ago, it seems a 
fairy-tale — we caused each other delights and pangs 
and tears. . . . 

But if I had a son I should say to him: "Dismiss 
from your mind all the cant you hear on the subject of 
sex. The passion of love is the central passion of 
human life. It should be humanized; it should be 
made beautiful. It should never be debased by a sense 
that it is in itself sinful, for that is to make the whole 
of life sinful and to corrupt our human experience at 
its very source. Love is not to be condemned and so 
degraded, but to be exercised and mastered. If you 
are of a cool temper and continence leaves your mind 
serene and your imagination unbesmirched, very well. 
But let not your soul, if it is ardent, become contami- 
nated and disordered by false shames and a false 
sense of sin. Love in itself is the source of loveliness 
and wisdom if it is gratified without falsehood and 

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without abandoning the sterner elements of life. Nat- 
ural things are made sinful only by a mistaken notion 
that they are so. Account love, then, as inevitable and 
lovely, but remain master of your soul and of your- 
self and of the larger purposes which you were born 
to fulfill." 

To me, as to every American youth, it had been 
said: " Passion, except within marriage, is the most 
degrading of sins. Within marriage it is forgiven but 
never mentioned as being, even there, unmentionable. 
This is the law." Meantime all the men and youths 
I knew slunk into the dark alleys of Queenshaven 
whither I did not follow them. And curiously, in that 
very act, they still believed the follies they proclaimed. 
They were simply moral men sinning against their 
own convictions. That astonishing ethical dualism of 
the English mind — (so truly and so moderately set 
forth by George Gissing in the memorable twentieth 
chapter of the third book of The Private Papers of 
Henry Ryecroft) — that ethical duality of conscience I 
hold the chief and most corrupting danger of our life 
as a people. It must be fought without ceasing and 
without mercy. . . . 

Of that duality there was nothing in my being. I 
was bound or I was free. But having been a slave so 
long I ran amuck in my freedom and in the recoil came 
almost to utter grief. I was saved and made steadfast 
only by the thought of those two watchers in the 
distant South. However absorbed in that most pas- 
sionate adventure, I never missed an opportunity of 
going home at Christmas or even at Easter — planned 
for it, saved for it, and always my mother's hand in 
mine and her eyes upon me made me well again. 

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THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

Also I could now conquer many moods and free my- 
self from them by fixing them in art. My verse was no 
longer the echo of a sonorous tradition. It grew no 
longer out of the love of poetry but out of the pain of 
life. And from my modern Germans as well as from 
a new and powerful movement in our English verse I 
learned to write directly and truly. Somehow* in 
Queenshaven, I had missed a poem which is not, of 
course, the greatest, but assuredly the most important 
English poem of the third quarter of the nineteenth 
century: Meredith's Modern Love. The application 
of English poetic art to the actual, the contemporary 
and the real had there been inaugurated. In addition 
I now read Henley and Housman's A Shropshire Lad 
and The Love Sonnets of Proteus and, above all, I 
found the two-volume edition of the poems of Arthur 
Symons. Granting the hostile critic his monotony of 
mood (but is not Shelley's mood quite as monotonous 
in a different spiritual key?), and his morbidness 
(though what is morbidness, after all?) and there re- 
mains in his work the creation of a new style, a new 
method, a new power. The conventional taste of his 
generation still lags behind his method, but in it is one 
of the essential forces of the future of English poetry. 



The various experiences which I have set down so 
briefly extended over two years. At the end of the first 
year I duly took my master's degree and applied for 
a fellowship. Among the group of students to which I 
belonged it was taken for granted that, since Ellard 
had completed his studies for the doctorate, I would 

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UP STREAM 

undoubtedly be chosen. I record this, heaven knows, 
not from motives of vanity but as part of the subtler 
purpose of this story. The faculty elected my friend 
G. I went, with a heavy heart, to interview Professor 
Brewer, not to push my claims to anything, but be- 
cause I was at my wits' end. I dreaded another year 
of tutoring and of living wretchedly from hand to 
mouth, without proper clothes, without books. Brewer 
leaned back in his chair, pipe in hand, with a cool and 
kindly smile. "It seemed to us," he stuttered, "that 
the university hadn't had its full influence on you." 
He suggested their disappointment in me and, by the 
subtlest of stresses, their sorrow over this disappoint- 
ment. I said that I had been struggling for a liveli- 
hood and that, nevertheless, my examinations had uni- 
formly received high grades and my papers, quite as 
uniformly, the public approval of Brent and himself. 
Hje avoided a direct answer by explaining that the de- 
partment had recommended me for a scholarship for 
the following year. The truth is, I think, that Brewer, 
excessively mediocre as he was, had a very keen tribal 
instinct of the self -protective sort and felt in me — what 
I was hardly yet consciously — the implacable foe of the 
New England dominance over our national life. I 
wasn't unaware of his hostility, but I had no way of 
provoking a franker explanation. 

I forgot my troubles in three beautiful months at 
home — three months seemed so long then — or, rather, 
1 crowded these troubles from my field of conscious- 
ness. I wouldn't even permit the fact that I wasn't 
elected to a scholarship to depress me. Brewer wrote* 
a letter of regret and encouragement that was very 
kindly in tone. The pleasant implication of that letter 

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THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

Was, of course, a spiritual falsehood of the crassest. 
He knew then precisely what he knew and finally told 
me ten months later. But his kind has a dread of the 
bleak weather of the world of truth, and approaches it 
gingerly, gradually, with a mincing gait. He, poor 
man, was probably unconscious of all that. In him, as 
in all like him, the corruption of the mental life is such 
that the boundaries between the true and the false are 
wholly obliterated. 

In, the passionate crises of the second year I often 
walked as in a dream. And I was encouraged by the 
fact that the department arranged a loan for my 
tuition. In truth, I was deeply touched by so unusual 
a kindness and I feel sure that the suggestion came 
from Brent. If so, Brewer again did me a fatal injury 
by not preventing that kindness. For he had then, I 
must emphasize, the knowledge he communicated to me 
later — the knowledge that held the grim upshot of my 
university career. 

Spring came and with it the scramble for jobs 
among the second year men. My friends were called 
in to conferences with Brewer; I was not. They dis- 
cussed vacancies, chances here and there. It wasn't 
the chagrin that hurt so ; it wasn't any fear for myself. 
After all I was only twenty-two and I was careless of 
material things. I thought of my father and my 
mother in the cruel sunshine of Queenshaven. Their 
hope and dream and consolation were at stake. I 
could see them, not only by day, but in the evening, 
beside their solitary lamps, looking up from their 
quiet books, thinking of me and of the future. ... I 
remembered how my father had believed in certain 
implications of American democracy. I remembered 

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UP STREAM 

... I was but a lad, after all. I couldn't face Brew- 
er's cool and careless smile. I wrote him a letter — a 
letter which, in its very earnestness and passionate 
Veracity must have struck like a discord upon the care- 
ful arrangements of his safe and proper nature. For 
in it I spoke of grave things gravely, not jestingly, 
as one should to be a New England gentleman: I 
spoke of need and aspiration and justice. His answer 
lies before me now and I copy that astonishingly 
smooth and chilly document verbatim: "It is very sen- 
sible of you to look so carefully into your plans at this 
juncture, because I do not at all believe in the wisdom 
of your scheme. A recent experience has shown me how 
terribly hard it is for a man of Jewish birth to get a 
good position. I had always suspected that it was a 
matter worth considering, but I had not known how 
wide-spread and strong it was. While we shall be glad 
to do anything we can for you, therefore, I cannot 
help feeling that the chances are going to be greatly 
against you. ' ' 

I sat in my boarding-house room playing with this 
letter. I seemed to have no feeling at all for the mo- 
ment. By the light of a sunbeam that fell in I saw 
that the picture of my parents on the mantelpiece was 
very dusty. I got up and wiped the dust off carefully. 
Gradually an eerie, lost feeling came over me. I took 
my hat and walked out and up Amsterdam Avenue, 
farther and farther to High Bridge and stood on the 
bridge and watched the swift, tiny tandems on the 
Speedway below and the skiffs gliding up and down 
the Harlem River. A numbness held my soul and 
mutely I watched life, like a dream pageant, float by 
me. ... I ate nothing till evening when I went into 

[122] 



THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

a bakery and, catching sight of myself in a mirror, 
noted with dull objectivity my dark hair, my melan- 
choly eyes, my unmistakably Semitic nose. . . . An 
outcast. ... A sentence arose in my mind which I 
have remembered and used ever since. So long as 
there is discrimination, there is exile. And for the 
first time in my life my heart turned with grief and 
remorse to the thought of my brethren in exile all 
over the world. . . . 

yi 

The subconscious self has a tough instinct of self- 
preservation. It thrusts from the field of vision, as 
Freud has shown, the painful and the hostile things of 
life. Thus I had forgotten, except at moments of 
searching reflection, the social fate of my father and 
mother, my failure to be elected to the fraternity at 
college, and other subtler hints and warnings. I had 
believed the assertion and made it myself that equality 
of opportunity was implicit in the very spiritual foun- 
dations of the Republic. This is what I wanted to be- 
lieve, what I needed to believe in order to go about the 
business of my life at all. I had listened with a correct 
American scorn to stories of how some distant kinsman 
in Germany, many years ago, had had to receive Chris- 
tian baptism in order to enter the consular service of 
his country. At one blow now all these delusions were 
swept away and the facts stood out in the sharp light 
of my dismay. Discrimination there was everywhere. 
But a definite and public discrimination is, at least, 
an enemy in the open. In pre-war Germany, for in- 
stance, no Jew could be prevented from entering the 
academic profession. Unless he was very brilliant and 

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UP STREAM 

productive his promotion was less rapid than that of 
his Gentile colleagues. He knew that and reckoned 
with it. He knew, too, for instance, that he could not 
become senior professor of German at Berlin (only 
associate professor like the late R. M. Meyer), nor 
Kultusminister, but he could become a full professor 
of Latin or philosophy, and, of course, of all the 
sciences. I am not defending these restrictions and I 
think the argument for them — that the German state 
was based upon an ethnic homogeneity which corre- 
sponds to a spiritual oneness — quite specious. I am 
contrasting these conditions with our own. We boast 
our equality and freedom and call it Americanism and 
speak of other countries with disdain. And so one is 
unwarned, encouraged and flung into the street. With 
exquisite courtesy, I admit. And the consciousness of 
that personal courtesy soothes the minds of our Gen- 
tile friends. ... It will be replied that there are a 
number of Jewish scholars in American colleges and 
universities. There are. The older men got in because 
nativistic anti-Semitism was not nearly as strong 
twenty-five years ago as it is to-day. Faint remnants 
of the ideals of the early Republic still lingered in 
American life. But in regard to the younger men I 
dare to assert that in each case they were appointed 
through personal friendship, family or financial pres- 
tige or some other abnormal relenting of the iron 
prejudice which is the rule. But that prejudice has 
not, to my knowledge, relented in a single instance in 
regard to the teaching of English. So that our guard- 
ianship of the native tongue is far fiercer than it is in 
an, after all, racially homogeneous state like Germany. 
Presidents, deans and departmental heads deny this 

[124] 



THE AMERICAN DISCOVERS EXILE 

fact or gloss it over in public. 'Among themselves it 
is admitted as a matter of course. 

I have not touched the deeper and finer issues, 
though I have written in vain if they are not clear. 
My purest energy and passion, my best human aspira- 
tions had been dedicated from my earliest years to a 
given end. It was far more than a question of bread 
and butter, though it was that too. I didn't know how 
to go on living a reasonable and reasonably harmon- 
ious inner life. I could take no refuge in the spirit and 
traditions of my own people. I knew little of them. 
My psychical life was Aryan through and through. 
Slowly, in the course of the years, I have discovered 
traits in me which I sometimes call Jewish. But that 
interpretation is open to grave doubt. I can, in reality, 
find no difference between my own inner life of 
thought and impulse and that of my very close friends 
whether American or German. So that the picture of 
a young man disappointed because he can't get the 
kind of a job he wants, doesn't exhaust, barely indeed 
touches the dilemma. I didn't know what to with my 
life or with myself. 

In this matter of freedom and equality and demo- 
cratic justice, then, I found in my Anglo-American 
world precisely that same strange dualism of con- 
science which I had discovered there in the life of sex. 
The Brewers in the academic world do truly believe 
that our society is free and democratic. "When they 
proclaim that belief at public banquets a genuine emo- 
tion fills their hearts. Just as a genuine emotion filled 
the hearts of my Southern friends (who used Mulatto 
harlots) when in the interest of purity and the home 

[125] 



UP STREAM 

they refused to sanction the enactment of any divorce 
law in their native state. 

I do not wish to speak bitterly or flippantly. I am 
approaching the analysis of thoughts and events be- 
side which my personal fate is less than nothing. And 
I need but think of my Queenshaven youth or of some 
passage of Milton or Arnold, or of those tried friend- 
ships that are so large a part of the unalterable good 
of life, or of the bright hair and gray English eyes of 
my own wife to know that I can never speak as an 
enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race. But unless that race 
abandons its duality of conscience, unless it learns to 
honor and practice a stricter spiritual veracity, it will 
either destroy civilization through disasters yet un- 
heard of or sink into a memory and into the shadow 
of a name. 



[126] 



CHAPTER VI 

The American Finds Refuge 



In my confusion of mind I didn't revise my dis- 
sertation and left the university without my doctor's 
degree. Brent was angry at this and I remember a 
scene in his study. He strode up and down and re- 
buked me with a sternness that showed his friendship 
toward me. I sat huddled in a chair. I couldn't bear 
to tell him what was going on within me. Whether he 
guessed it or not, he made every effort to find me some 
suitable employment. I suspect that he actually walked 
the glaring streets that early summer from office to 
office. He got me a sub-editorship on one of those huge 
compilation sets which people seem to buy — queer 
kinds of people that one never meets — and, one hopes, 
read with profit. And this employment led, in the 
course of a few months, to a position on the editorial 
staff of Singleton, Leaf and Company. 

In the meantime I went home, joylessly for the first 
time. The glaring fact couldn't be hidden. I had no 
academic position, however humble. Here, too, the 
evil unveracity of early influences crippled my soul. 
It was generally agreed that there was no Anti-Sem- 
itism in America. It had been held un-American to 



[127] 



UP STREAM 

assert that there was. ... So I even permitted my 
father to suspect that I had, perhaps, neglected my 
studies. I said that I preferred the career of letters. 
"But this is hack-work," he retorted. "It's a be- 
ginning," I declared lamely, "I'm only twenty- two." 
My mother felt that a shadow lay subtly between us. 
It seemed to me — foolishly, I know now — that I could 
not offer her the affront of saying that I was doomed 
to this failure because I was her child. ... A special 
delivery letter came recalling me to New York. I 
didn't want to go, I wanted to beg my father to let me 
stay and think and plan some other future. But I had 
grown up among a dumb folk who hold it ill-bred to 
have a troubled heart; I had tried so hard to be like 
them, for the love of their art, that I had gained no 
power over life or speech. . . . 

Often and often, in subsequent years, when I was 
irked by the unresponsiveness of students or tired of 
lecturing, the thought flashed through my mind: For 
all that, thank Heaven, it's not Singleton, Leaf and 
Company. I can, at least, see the sun and think my 
own thoughts. And there arises in me the memory of 
that large, scientifically clean building filled with the 
hum of the engine that drove the monotype machine 
and with the acrid odor of fresh print. A sharp elec- 
tric light burned over my desk from eight-thirty to 
twelve- thirty and from one-thirty to five-thirty, and 
next to me stood all day a long, loose fellow whose 
small, pointed head seemed fairly to dangle and 
tremble, like an ugly and noxious flower, at the end of 
his scrawny neck. He was constantly in a Uriah Heep- 
ish ecstasy of contortion over the greatness of the firm 
we served and the huge increases in advertising matter 

[128] 



THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

to be "made up" for its magazines month by month. 
This man and his green-eyed leer — there was some- 
thing coldly lecherous in it — became to me a symbol 
of my degradation. For it was degradation. Single- 
ton, Leaf and Company did not consciously or pur- 
posefully publish a line for its literary or scientific 
value. The stuff was accepted or, more often, ar- 
ranged for merely that it might sell. It did. But the 
business had no more to do with literature or science 
(except by accident: occasionally good work will sell), 
than a breakfast food factory. The firm had its own 
special ideals, to be sure. It accepted and then refused 
to publish Dreiser's first great book. But except for 
this gentlemanly avoidance of sex in literature, it had 
no prejudices. It published, in my time, a most slan- 
derous and ignorant piece, of Anti-Semitic propaganda. 
Nor was any book or article too shoddy, too ill-written, 
too superficial to put more money into the purses of 
Singleton and Leaf. So far, so good. In our preda- 
tory economic system such was the clear right of these 
gentlemen. But why the odious corruption of which 
my pitiful and shabby neighbor was the sign and sym- 
bol? Why "get together luncheons" for the firm's 
employees with speeches and base rhetoric and brazen 
enthusiasm? Enthusiasm for the ill-gotten gains of 
Singleton and Leaf! They were the masters and we 
were the men. Very well. Why this unctuous lying, 
this degrading of the souls of the wage-slave? The 
proletarian printers were far more self-respecting in 
this matter than the business and editorial employees 
who fawned and "enthused" (vile word for a vile 
thing) over the growth of the business. . . . Later I 
often gave the best that was in me and often the last 

[129] 



UP STREAM 

ounce of my strength for a wretched wage. But I 
served the spiritual common-weal in no ignoble way. 
And I could have served that common-weal in a far 
humbler office with my human dignity unimpaired. 
The meanest door-keeper in the house of the Republic 
still serves — the Republic. There should not be money 
enough in the world to hire any self-sustaining man to 
minister to the voracities of those whose aims are alien 
from his own and commonly demonstrably sinister. 
When former students of mine tell me that they are 
"making good" with this corporation or that and 
boast of the power and wealth of those corporations, a 
sense of bleakness fill me. The humble digger of the 
earth may be a slave in body ; the young business man 
or engineer who furthers the interests of his master 
is a slave in soul. 

All summer, a great and flaring summer, I watched 
the tramps and "pan-handlers" on Union Square dur- 
ing my luncheon hour. They dozed over stray news- 
papers and smoked remnants of tobacco in disreput- 
able pipes. They fascinated me — their white, un- 
shaven faces, reddish eyes, frayed coats, ripped boots. 
They stared at me — careless, unashamed, imperturb- 
able . . . free, in that they had cast off responsibility 
and subservience. Types of the eternal beggar, the out- 
cast, the rebel, the unquiet one. He was beside the 
gates of Niniveh — as in Union Square. But most of 
us have an undying house-dweller and even house- 
holder within us. "We need warmth and security and 
respect. Especially when we are young. Yet I under- 
stood the temptation of stepping out of the ranks and 
drifting off into the land of unconsidered men. . . . 
I understood it so well that I openly and frankly, at 

[130] 



THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

Singleton, Leaf and Company's, showed my sense 
of the absurdity and vulgarity of the whole business. 
So the firm set me down as an able but queer and un- 
ambitious person — one that sensible people could make 
nothing of — and we parted on friendly enough terms. 
I still have a letter of recommendation that Leaf gave 
me. It seems queer and remote and unreal. It did me 
little good. 

But I met Mary that year. . . . Bread came some- 
how. I wrote stuff for the Review of Reviews and 
articles for the Times and she wrote verses for it. I 
sold some poems to Collier's. We had each other. . . . 
I recall September days full of a soft, grey drizzle. 
The lights of the street-lamps trembled in a thousand 
rays through the wet air. But we, under one umbrella, 
recked little of the world. The weather cleared and 
brightened as October came. We lingered on River- 
side Drive and heard the rustle of the leaves under our 
feet and waited until the sun set in a bronze haze over 
the palisades. We sat on a bench under the bare pop- 
lars with all the stars of heaven for our own. We were, 
of course, aware of the necessary briefness of this 
period, but we dwelt with all our might in the days and 
hours — numbered days and hours — that were given us. 
The windfalls grew fewer and fewer, the weather 
colder and colder. With a brave and lovely bright- 
ness in her eyes Mary took me to the boat. For the 
present we were defeated and I had to seek refuge at 
home. 



Queenshaven was beautiful in its own type of 
wintry beauty. The sunlight filtered through the blue 

[131] 



UP STREAM 

air with a smooth, golden glow like honey. All objects 
were defined with an indescribable clearness. The dry 
spears of the palmettos rattled softly. My father and 
mother were so glad to have me that, by tacit consent, 
all troubling questions were dismissed. Also my 
father's income had increased soemwhat and it seemed 
to me that to be calm for a period and think hard was, 
after all, the strictly practical thing to do. First of all, 
it seemed clear to me then that I could not teach. Even 
were it possible after long months or even years to get 
a small appointment, I was unwilling to risk the sus- 
pense and the humiliation. There was nothing left 
me but such skill as I had in writing. But criticism 
and verse would not suffice. Prose fiction was the only 
thing at which one could earn a living. So I deter- 
mined to become a short story writer and a novelist. 
Perhaps I didn't reason the matter out quite so 
coldly. Or else I let my reasoning be guided by a 
strong and hitherto unsuspected impulse which stirred 
somewhere in the depth of consciousness. The things 
I had seen and lived through in New York with all the 
impassioned observation and pain of youth seemed to 
become denser at certain points, to gather — in my 
imaginative memory — into definte motifs. I seemed 
suddenly to be able to see them with a more penetrat- 
ing eye. Fragments torn from the context of life 
seemed to become organic, to lift themselves from the 
more inert mass of experience and to take on an in- 
dependent existence. What I needed next was a 
method. I had never studied closely the technique of 
modern fiction. A very sure instinct led me to Henry 
James, to the clear, brimming stories of his middle 
years : The Lesson of the Master, Broken Wings, The 

[132] 



THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

Altar of the Dead. I soon knew what, for my purpose, 
I needed to know. I didn't, I must say in justice to 
myself, imitate Henry James at all. But no one with 
the craftsman's insight can read these stories — I 
lingered over about fifteen — without learning from 
that close and scrupulous master the essential secrets 
of imaginative narrative. 

In a state of very high mental tension — extraordi- 
narily clear and yet almost mystical — I wrote three 
stories. Nothing I have ever done cost me so little 
trouble. There was no change or erasure in the manu- 
scripts. Yet I felt quite certain that the work had — 
in structure, style, characterization — a real and a new 
felicity. I am recording the feelings of the time; I 
have not read the stories in years. But I was not 
wholly wrong. For only a few months ago Dreiser 
said to me: "Why don't you reprint those early 
stories? I never saw stuff so full of a sense of beauty." 

I typed my work and hesitated. A friend in New 
York had once said thoughtfully: "Maybe you could 
get stuff into the magazines more easily if you used a 
pseudonym. Your name's very Jewish." I pondered 
the matter. I did not know how absurd his notion was. 
Should I use a pseudonym? Should I — it was possible 
— make my name less foreign by a change in spelling? 
I had a few difficult hours. Should I risk my last 
chance? In spite of my recent experience I didn't feel 
nearly so strongly on nationality and its rights in 
America as I do now. Nevertheless I decided not to 
betray myself even to the extent of concealing or of 
altering my name. True, however, to the traditions 
of my Queenshaven past, I sent my stories to the At- 
lantic Monthly. 

[133] 



UP STREAM 

In due time the editors of the Atlantic replied that 
"they were not unaware of the quality or significance 
of these sketches, but that even among the clientele of 
the Atlantic there were, they feared, not enough people 
who would care for them. ' ' My mother and father, in 
their unalterable devotion to quality rather than profit- 
ableness of achievement, were proud of this evidently 
sincere statement. But I thought of Mary who was 
coming to visit my mother, and the fear crept over me 
that I might be doomed to penniless quality and un- 
popularity. It occurred to me that I knew nothing of 
the popular fiction of the day. So I tried to read 
stories in the magazines. But I couldn't. Nor have I 
succeeded since. The stuff pretends to render life and 
interpret it ! and has no contact with reality at any 
point. Dishonest, sapless twaddle, guided by an im- 
possible moral perfectionism — a false perfectionism, 
too, since its ideals are always tribal — and strung on a 
string of pseudo-romantic love. I remembered, how- 
ever, that I had once or twice 'read in the Smart Set 
stories with a touch, at least, of vitality, earnestness, 
verisimilitude. So I sent my rejected stories there. In 
less than two weeks came a letter from Charles Hanson 
Towne, who was then the editor. He accepted all three 
stories and asked for more. 



m 



One knows the kind of anecdote that is told of tha 
literary aspirant. That's what he is called. The kind 
of advice — with its broad touch of commercialism and 
bourgeois canniness — that is given him. Never be dis- 
couraged! Eewrite! Send your stories in order to 

[134] 



THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

every magazine in the country ! Watch what the editors 
want! Success to him who sticks it out — two years, 
three, five. Success — the current connotations of the 
word are enough to make a voluntary outcast of any 
self-respecting soul. Well, I said to myself, I had 
made up my mind four months before to write stories. 
The result showed the absurdity of the humdrum ad- 
vice, the vulgar maxims of the tradesmen in letters. 
It did — in the deepest sense. Only I drew impossible 
inferences in the tense hopefulness of those days. And 
my delusion was fated to completeness. Joel Chandler 
Harris founded Uncle Remus' Magazine in Atlanta 
and bought my fourth story, sending, almost by re- 
turn mail, a letter of enthusiastic praise and a checque 
for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. My father 
was, characteristically, aglow; he saw visions of 
grandeur. My mother's womanly and solitary heart 
yearned over Mary. So Mary and I were married and 
we all settled down in an old, roomy house in Queens- 
haven. The house overlooked the bay and from our 
study windows Mary and I watched the horned moon 
float over the silken swell of the dark waters and 
listened to the tide. . . . 

Those altitudes of life are brief and have, upon 
retrospect, a touch of utter pathos. To be upon them 
you must, the world being what it is, be out of touch 
with reality. There is the temper, to be sure, that 
frankly accepts reality as sordid, mean, unresponsive 
to our finer impulses and, turning resolutely from it, 
strives after the illusions and takes refuge in the art 
that depicts life "as it ought to be." And commonly, 
in street and church and school among us, such people 
call themselves idealists and scorn us to whom the illu- 

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UP STREAM 

sion and the dream is too cheap a thing. To us there 
comes, after the first flush of youth, the troubling sense 
of being duped to no good or enduring purpose. We 
come to live in an autumnal world of the spirit. . . . 
Yet we are the true lovers of the ideal. "We refuse to 
be put off with a wretched substitute. Either the values 
by which we would live are valid in the world of reality 
or they are not. If they are not, it is better and wiser 
to know and to submit. The eternal children among 
men, on the other hand, pass from toy to toy. Yet in 
the end they must see — with what a late and grey and 
piteous disillusion — that their toys are but tinsel and 
wax and bran. . . . 

Mary and I believed that here, in our American 
place and time, fine, sound, veracious art would easily 
gain for us the wherewithal for our very frugal needs 
and joys. I wrought out my stories with the severest 
exactions upon structure, verbal grace, inner truth. 
Towne bought more of them. The editor of a weekly 
of rather shady reputation asked for stories. A sense 
of insecurity which gradually overcame me persuaded 
me to sell him my manuscripts. If the stories were as 
perfect as I could make them, what did it matter? Un- 
happily all these people paid only a cent a word. I 
spent two weeks of the most highly organized artistic 
labor over a story and the material result was thirty 
dollars — payable at some hazy date months ahead. I 
summoned my deepest and serenest powers and wrote 
a longer narrative and sent it to Harper's. Henry 
Mills Alden saw its artistic points and half agreed to 
buy it — if I would give it a happy ending. But the 
story didn't end happily! I looked at Mary. She 
should have had a new gown. And so, for the first 

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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

time, I went in for the trade of writing and altered 
the ending of my story. But Alden didn't take the 
story, after all. 

A happy ending. Cheerfulness. Here are the rocks 
on which I suffered my second ship-wreck in life. For 
the Alden incident is merely the type and symbol of 
many others. All the editors admitted that my stories 
had very uncomomn merits. But they were too sombre. 
. . . Once, just once, I wrote a story full of gentle 
pathos. With a touch of irony I called it A Sentimental 
Story. When it appeared editors from all quarters 
wrote to me. Send us stories like your Sentimental 
Story ! The abysmal folly ! I could no more recapture 
that mood — so unlike my typical moods — than I could 
bring back the perished hour in which that mood had 
come to me. Of such considerations, as of the whole 
nature af art, the editors seemed to be densely 
ignorant. 

I determined to make myself independent of the 
magazines and their absurd requirements. I felt the 
need of a larger canvas anyhow. So, writing just 
stories enough for our barest needs — my father and 
mother kept the pot boiling and paid the rent — I began 
a novel. 

My subject wasn't, I can see now, a highly fruit- 
ful onet Nor had I yet quite transcended the notion 
that one must follow to some definite end in circum- 
stances the strands of the narrative. In other words, I 
was still unaware of the endless flowing of the world, 
of the utter absence of finality at any point except the 
point of death. And also, a subtle and troubled sense 
of what — through the editors and through personal 
talk — I suspected concerning the attitude of my Amer- 

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ican audience, prevented me, at many points, from 
practising my art in its full severity. One must have 
bread. . . . Yet, with every allowance made, the thing 
was felt, seen, rendered. It was young, that first novel 
of mine, but there were pages and chapters that both 
in the texture of the prose and the shaping of the mat- 
ter had a touch of life and beauty. 

Often now I wrote on my sheer nerves. A sense of 
discouragement had come over us all. Small checques 
for stories dribbled in from time to time. But my 
father had to work harder than ever. Instead of lift- 
ing the burden of life from him and my mother I had, 
in the material sense, added to it. The thing was un- 
endurable and throbbed in me with the fierceness of a 
wound. Then the manuscript of my novel came back 
from a large publishing house, and in the smiting heat 
of the Queenshaven summer Mary fell ill. 

With a sense, at last, almost of despair, my father 
and I borrowed some money. I had to get another 
start, to lift the burden from him, to fight my own 
man's battle. My mother and I had a sense of the 
bitter tragedy of that parting, though we sought to 
conceal it even from ourselves and though Mary was 
full of cheer and sweetness and courage. Ferris rose 
to the occasion and came to the train to see us off. 
Perhaps he had a suspicion of how broken and defeated 
I felt. 

IV 

"We took a small flat on Washington Heights. The 
house was new, but it was dingy by, nature — cheap, 
ugly, abominable. Yet we had the Hudson land- 
scape almost at our door and we had money enough for 

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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

three months and the Smart Set owed me a checque or 
two. So Mary and I picnicked in our little kitchen — we 
had no dining-table — and felt more hopeful. And there 
was a glow in our shabby study when Towne sent an 
enthusiastic letter concerning the manuscript of the 
novel and promised to get a publisher for it. 

Meantime I had to make money. The respect- 
able magazines would have none of me. They re- 
jected my poems and stories with rigid regularity. 
The editors never failed to praise my work and never 
dreamed of buying it. There was something in it — on 
that point they were unanimous and clear — which their 
subscribers would not endure. Towne, my one edi- 
torial friend, introduced me to the editor-in-chief of 
the Munsey magazines, an agreeable, sweet-natured 
Irishman. The latter and his assistant, always hard 
pressed for copy, gave a little luncheon party for me 
and explained to me the mysteries of the "serial." 
The All-Story Magazine, The Scrap-Book, The Cava- 
lier, were in constant need of serial stories of from 
twenty thousand to sixty thousand words in length. 
These serials had to be built in blocks of three chap- 
ters, each block thus constituting a ten thousand word 
installment. Each chapter had to end with a minor 
device of suspended mystery, each installment with a 
major device. The mystery must not be solved until 
the last chapter of the last installment. Nor must it 
be solved then by any method involving an explana- 
tory or retrospective narrative. There must be little 
description and no analysis. There must be a power- 
ful love interest but no hint of sex. The pay for these 
marvelous concoctions was two-thirds of a cent a 
word. But the bait for the struggling hack lay in this. 

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You could drivel to the tune of sixty thousand words 
and the company paid on acceptance. I am glad to 
record this significant little feature of our civilization. 
No one else is likely to do it. And these magazines 
sold enormously at that time. 

They had given me some excellent wine at the 
luncheon party and as I walked up-town on the Av- 
enue the proposal seemed an admirable one with which 
to bridge over the time until the novel should make 
my fame and fortune. At home I took a soberer view. 
I hadn't a particle of ingenuity; I had trained myself 
in the austerest methods of the novelist's art. Flau- 
bert, James, Conrad were my teachers. Above all, 
George Moore. I wrote slowly, with infinite pains, 
weighing each word for its values in flavor, color, tone 
— hovering over the melody of the sentence, the har- 
mony of the paragraph, desperate when the beauty of 
the prose failed to orchestrate the strain of the mean- 
ing. . . . But I had to make money. 

I thought closely : There was no earthly way of 
building a Munsey serial except upon a motif of pur- 
suit. And it must be the pursuit of a criminal, a treas- 
ure or a girl. Preferably of two — the criminal is 
responsible for his original crime plus the disappear- 
ance of the girl. Or a pursuit of all three — the crim- 
inal's crime involves spiriting away the treasure and 
the girl. Then, in the last chapter of the last install- 
ment the hero defeats the criminal, obtains the treas- 
ure, marries the girl. So far the thing worked out with 
mathematical accuracy. Each yarn must then be indi- 
vidualized by differences in setting and incident and 
such touches of quaintness or breadth of adventurous- 
ness as could be given it. I reread Henry Esmond 

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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

and The Master of Balantrae for that note of gallant 
spiritedness which is common to both. Then, from 
the half-forgotten narratives of a Queenshaven ac- 
quaintance^ — a seaman turned shoe-merchant — I built 
up my first synopsis. This synopsis was pronounced 
good by the editors and I proceeded to the task of 
composition. Now came the rub. I had to get rid of 
my usual style and point of view. They were worse 
than useless for the purpose. I had to write briskly 
and in a falsetto. I struggled for days. Then came 
the solution. I ceased composing with pen and paper. 
On the typewriter I could assume the whole alien out- 
look and tone and turn out, on good days, copy 
adequate for the purpose without change or erasure. 
I have written as high as six thousand words of serial 
stuff a day, driving my Gibson hero over land and sea, 
by hair-breadth 'scapes, until he had the villain (usu- 
ally, by a pleasant American convention, a foreigner) 
by the throat and a girl and a treasure in each arm. 

I wrote and sold six serials against every human 
and artistic instinct of my nature. Then I broke 
down. The vein of base invention wouldn't yield an- 
other drop; the insufferable falseness of the whole 
business literally turned my stomach. I was ready to 
do anything, suffer anything — only not write serials. 



Meanwhile there was the novel, the thought of 
which sustained Mary and me. Towne had given it to 
Dreiser and Dreiser liked it. We had been reading 
Sister Carrie which had just made its second and defi- 
nite appearance, and Dreiser's approval repayed me 

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amply for the snubs of the commercial editors and pub- 
lishers. True that Dreiser had no style. Neither had 
Balzac. And yet even those quaint vulgarities of 
phrase, which he has since eliminated, helped to render 
his subject in Sister Carrie. Occasionally, too, through 
the sheer fullness and exactness of that penetrating 
vision of his he strikes out curious, unlovely, journalese 
little sentences that are worth tons of ordinary smooth 
writing. And how he wrings and cleanses the heart 
with the fates of his people ! There is no prof ounder 
illustration than the character of Hurstwood in all 
literature of the great saying of Goethe that every 
concrete thing, if it perfectly represents itself, becomes 
the sufficient symbol of all. We know this man as we 
know few men in life. And we know, too, if we can 
begin to feel the approach of middle age, that there is 
a Hurstwood in each one of us. . . . 

I went to see Dreiser and felt less shame over my 
serials. For wasn't he editing The Delineator? The 
old question of bread. His office high up in the But- 
terick building had from its large windows one of the 
most splendid and heroic views in the world — far 
across the harbor of New York. There he sat, a large, 
unshapely, sombre hulk of a man — (he has brightened 
and softened since) — with head bent forward, folding 
and eternally unfolding his handkerchief into ac- 
cordion pleats. There was a brooding gaze in his near- 
sighted eyes — the gaze with which he has seen life 
more largely and truly than any other American novel- 
ist. And he has let life interpret itself upon the basis 
of its eternal facts. He has let life mean — life ! Not 
some moralistic crochet that is the weapon of his own 
intolerance. By virtue of that quality he is, in his 

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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

humble and homespun way, of the kin, at least, of the 
masters. Of what did Homer approve, or Shake- 
speare, or Rembrandt or Goethe f 

Dreiser recommended my novel to the small firm 
of publishers who had recently brought out Sister 
Carrie. So, very soon, I had my first contract in my 
pocket and was very proud of it, and Mary and I 
walked on a memorable night under a huge, pale moon 
on Wadsworth Avenue and reckoned out how much 
we would have if our novel— we called it ours — sold 
twenty thousand copies. If it sold only ten thou- 
sand — ? Oh, it would be a beginning, and I could 
write another in peace and there would be no more 
serials. I sent an enthusiastic letter to my mother and 
father and they trusted as we did. 

The novel appeared. For a first book the critical 
reception was remarkable. William Morton Payne 
wrote of it in a well-known journal as a book "in which 
the imperative demands of technique — both verbal and 
architectonic — are never ignored, and which yet has no 
lack of rich human substance. ... It is not a book for 
the young person to read," he went on, "but one from 
which the mature mind can get nothing but good and 
which offers a singular satisfaction to the artistic per- 
ceptions." Similar was the tone of other reviews. 
There was generous praise, to be sure, but never with- 
out some subtle implication of warning. A mythical, 
at least, a theoretical "young person" was, somehow, 
to be guarded against my book. A number of review- 
ers took up the cudgels for this young person and be- 
labored me in unmeasured terms. The Presbyterian 
editor of the Queenshaven Courier, a friend of mine — 
(I thought) — arose in his wrath and his terror for the 

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UP STREAM 

young person and abused my book in terms that were 
literally foul-mouthed. . . . An old college friend 
from Queenshaven asked me, months later, what my 
wife thought of the book. He asked it with the leer 
of free-masonry in nastiness which moral men assume 
in smoking-rooms. To him there was no difference be- 
tween a smutty joke and a naturalistic novel. He 
would have read Mme. Bovary in secret, as a "dirty 
book," and hidden it from his wife. To her who was 
"sweet and pure" he gives, I know, the works of 
Robert Chambers and Harold Bell Wright. ... I re- 
flected on the young person for whom American litera- 
ture is kept "clean and wholesome." How old was 
this young person? Evidently seventeen, at least. For 
the most foolish parent would supervise the reading of 
youngsters under that age without necessarily con- 
demning the books withheld. And was the young 
American at seventeen such an imbecile that the cen- 
tral passions of life — their existence even — if pre- 
sented and interpreted in art came in the nature of a 
revelation? Or else so vicious that true books would 
start him straightway on an abandoned career ? Surely 
not ! Then it was but again the old, ineradicable lust 
for lying, for unveracity of soul, for an unf eatured and 
unmeaning harmlessness of surface — the old duality of 
conscience which makes men pretend that the thing is 
what it is not, but rather some foolish, blank, marrow- 
less phantom. . . . Literature, to be wholesome, my 
friend the professor of English philology used to tell 
me, should portray life as it ought to be. How ought it 
to be? Ah, cheerful, sober, kindly . . . like the Book 
of Job, I suppose, or the Illiad, or the Divine Comedy 
or Lear or Faust ! Without passion or sorrow or the 

[144] 



THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

hardihood of thought. . . . Base-ball, prohibition and 
the Saturday Evening Post. What spiritual impli- 
cations of a national culture. 

How could my poor little book brave such an array 
of forces'? It didn't sell. It didn't sell at all. I wrote 
another without one touch of the sensuous beauty of 
the first — a bare, plain, austere transcript from life, 
holding within itself, because it is of the very core 
of realty, a massive moral implication. This book, of 
which I am still proud in retrospect, was published 
too. And Anthony Comstock, that human symbol of 
the basic lies of our social structure, confiscated the 
copies and caused the plates to be destroyed. I was 
beaten, broken, breadless. I was a scholar and for- 
bidden to teach, an artist and forbidden to write. Lib- 
erty, opportunity. The words had nothing friendly to 
my ear. 

VI 

Mary and I agreed that, so defeated, we couldn't 
go home both for our own and for my parents' sake. 
It would be only a palliative, after all. Somehow, 
though all the forces of life seemed against me — my 
health was poor now, too — I must struggle on. And 
so there comes to me now from that period the memory 
of many months, strangely quiet, for all the care and 
need, and full of an almost eerie sunshine. I see Mary 
and myself wandering across queer neighborhoods — a 
sticky, swarming yet faintly genteel street called 
Bradhurst Avenue — on our way to Third. Somewhere 
about us we carried, carefully wrapped, the silver 
spoons we were going to pawn. The gas-bill had to 
be paid or the milk-bill. Then my father, in his ever 

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UP STREAM 

watchful goodness, would send a money-order or a 
small checque would come in and we would take a long 
tramp just for fun. Up Riverside Drive to Dyckman 
Street or into queer neighborhoods in the Bronx where 
we discovered, among many other things, an empty, 
sandy, forlorn little street called Shakespeare Avenue. 
These wanderings rested my worn nerves. 

I am not quite sure how we did live. My father 
helped. Friends helped — friends of Mary and of 
mine, now of us both — friends who had and have no 
motive but their affection for us, our friends still, Jew 
and Gentile, of whom it touches me to think. I wrote 
reviews for The Nation and The Forum. I read manu- 
scripts for a friendly publishing house. I gave a few 
private lessons. But the situation was an impossible 
one. It was only putting off week by week — how often 
we did pawn the silver — a day of inevitable collapse. 

I went back to Brent. It was a bitter thing to be 
forced to do. He set in motion the whole machinery of 
the department, he gave me the full weight of his influ- 
ence. It was useless. I was refused at the University 
of Virginia — because I was a Jew. I was refused at 
the University of Minnesota — because I was a Jew. 
The reason was scarcely veiled; it was not debatable. 
Ellard was now teaching at Monroe. He plead with 
his chief and Brent and Richards wrote to the man. 
He refused me — because I was a Jew. . . . Brent felt, 
rightly, that he was at the end of his resources. No 
one could have done more. 

It occurred to me, of course, that I might teach 
German. But I felt, in a sense, insufficiently prepared. 
My philological training, for instance, had all been 
from the point of view of English. But Richards, like 

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THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

Brent, had faith in me and brushed that consideration 
aside. An instructorship at Princeton was vacant. 
Bichards showed me the letter which he wrote to the 
head of the German Department there. He spoke of 
my abilities, of my character, of my personality. He 
touched on the fact of my race and defended me with 
noble emphasis from its supposed or real faults. I 
was refused. . . . Some years later a university in the 
farther West needed a professor of German. The 
attention of the Dean there was called to my work and 
reputation as a scholar and teacher. He wrote me a 
tentative letter. I answered but never heard again. 
Later he confided to a friend of mine that he had 
sounded the trustees. It would have been useless to 
propose the name of a Jew. . . . All the men who 
had refused me at the various universities were Anglo- 
Americans, pillars of the democracy, proclaimers of 
its mission to set the bond free and equalize life's op- 
portunities for mankind. I shall be accused, of course, 
of making too much of this matter. Not so. I may not 
be borne out by To-day. But there will be a To-mor- 
row. It was a legitimate and searching test of the 
democratic pretensions of the society which these men 
represent and of the temper of that society. Their 
reactions register accurately the spirit of the nativistic 
oligarchy which rules us. . . . By this time Ellard 
was thoroughly alarmed for me. He went to his friend, 
the head of the German Department at Monroe and 
laid the matter before him. Ellard 's friend — now for 
years mine too, — is a German, the finest, deepest- 
souled type. In six weeks I had my appointment to 
an instructorship at Monroe. . . . 

The months between April and October had to be 

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bridged. But I got a piece of translation to do and 
also, refreshed by hope for the future, I wrote one 
more serial. In my leisure hours I wrote a text-book 
in the field of G-ermanies so as to make a respectable 
entrance into my new profession. I meant to devote 
myself undividedly to it, for I was convinced now, 
through experience and reflection, that my art product 
could not, in this age, commend itself to the strange 
minds of my countrymen. To poetry only did I hope 
to devote some time in the future. But I was not aware 
of all the conditions within the academic life, nor did I 
count with the heaviness of the coming years. 

I had not been at home in many months. Mary was 
kept in New York by a misfortune among her kin. So 
I went alone with a feeling, half of delight and half of 
bitter, grinding remorse. I had a job. But I was 
twenty-eight and the job paid one thousand dollars a 
year. I had wanted to do so much. I came with empty 
hands. I had seen the color of life now and was able 
to estimate my chances. And so I knew that the good 
dream of the years was over and that I would never 
lift my father and mother out of the life they were 
living, that I would not even be able ever to dwell near 
them again, but always half a continent away. Final 
and fatal issues. At home they did not make these 
thoughts hard for me, God knows, but were glad in the 
bit of luck that had come and my mother promised to 
visit Mary and me in the West and so make the long 
year of absence shorter. I stayed at home ten weeks, 
happy weeks, though often I felt a tremor of unearthly 
fear — all the old eerie dread for my mother. . . . 

And in the quietude of my own mind I went over 
the years that had gone by since I had first left home. 

[148] 



THE AMERICAN FINDS REFUGE 

I went over these years bit by bit. What were their 
fruits? In every worldly sense — not only in the base 
one — I had been and I was a wretched failure. Yet I 
could not help believing that I had good, even notable 
talents. I knew also that sloth or shirking were not 
among my faults of mind or character. Why, then 
had it been so 1 It had been so, the answer came, be- 
cause a man can make neither his gifts nor his char- 
acter count except through those methods and insti- 
tutions which society has organized. From these I had 
hitherto been, in many subtle ways and in one way 
that was gross and obvious, mercilessly excluded. 

I had turned to creative art. But my stories and 
novels had failed, because my way of looking at life 
seemed strange and sinister to most of my country- 
men. For my vision of it was not of a superficial, 
kindly affair, all pleasantly prearranged. "If you do 
so, you are good and happy, if otherwise, bad and un- 
happy, and, what is worse, not like what other folks 
desire to think they are." . . . For the last time I 
read the successful novels of that year. That way were 
fame and fortune. But the stuff made me feel doubly 
hopeless and doubly innocent. The stories were cheer- 
ful — like cheerful liars. They were not about harsh 
things or noble things like myrrh or wine, only about 
doleful things and sweetish things, like soup and 
liquorice. They were not about love and aspiration 
and death. They were about flirting and success and 
old folks ' homes. They were not even pure, they Were 
only proper. Life, in them, wasn't even austere, only 
expurgated. They were false to the shallow core of 
them, false and dishonorable. The period, it is to be 
remembered was 1910. But even today an eminent 

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artist like Sherwood Anderson finds the conventional 
periodicals inaccessible and suffers the obvious conse- 
quences. 

Once more then, I accepted my fate. But it was 
not easy. For the weeks rolled by and I knew that I 
was going a thousand miles away and had no idea when 
I would be able to earn money enough to come back. 
Not for myself did my resignation to rigorous poverty 
cut into my soul, nor for Mary — for she and I had 
each other and friends and the years to come — but for 
the sake of those two wan faces that disappeared from 
my sight as the train pulled out of the Queenshaven 
station. 



[150] 



CHAPTER VII 

The Business of Education. 



Monroe is a forest city set among lakes. Indian 
burial mounds dot the hills and beside one of those 
blue lakes shy tepees appear overnight at certain sea- 
sons. The air is sharp, tonic and primitive. The 
storms of autumn sweep through the great trees with 
a severe and iron music. City) and lakes and forests 
have in my memory an air that is primaeval and yet 
somehow touched with grace and learning. They seem 
as established as a temple, yet as wild as an eagle's 
wing. The university is set upon a hill; its walls and 
groves are mirrored in the most beautiful of the five 
lakes. For years Monroe and its memories had to 
suffice me for my inner springs of beauty. To-day that 
beauty, like so much else in the world, is scarred and 
tarnished in my mind. . . . 

Mary, was kept in the East by illness among her 
people. I came alone to Monroe during the sparkle 
and glow of its Indian summer. Ellard met me and we 
passed some weeks in talking and rowing near the 
yellow and bronze and scarlet of the lake shores. With 
a fine sagacity that I have always found in the most 
poetical spirits — not in mere artistic temperaments — 

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UP STREAM 

lie gave me pithy and exact advice in regard to this 
new career and activity and in regard to the char- 
acters of the men with whom I was to live and work. 
He took me to see my chief Vollberg — tall, elegant, 
careworn, expansive, one of the soundest minds and 
hearts in the world; to B., all burning eyes, domed 
forehead, Socratic nose, sputtering, lyrical speech, 
afterwards my special friend and comrade of that 
group ; to F., accomplished, handsome, but too good a 
lover of beauty to be worldly in an evil sense; to P., 
with his snapping, black Slavic eyes and snapping, 
ironic speech and vast learning. And these were only 
a few of that astonishing German department which 
was, in, my time, one of the goodliest fellowships of 
comradly and learned men on earth. Most of them are 
gone from there now — scattered and futile and alone. 
They think of Monroe, I am sure, and B., at least, who 
is still there, remembers that first departmental jaunt 
in which I took part — miles of autumnal forest and 
golden field and then an inn, and free and racy talk 
on art and life and scholarship; supper of roast fowl 
and potatoes and cool, yellow beer, and then the walk 
back over the shivering tracery of the trees' shadows 
on the long, moonlit road. Such memories are preci- 
ous amid the waste and confusion of later years. They 
ring and gleam across time from a saner and serener 
world. . . . 

The sense of both liberation and security which my 
first academic position gave me, the beauty of Monroe, 
the presence of Ellard, the forming of new friendships 
— all these things caused me to take immediately a 
very glowing view of my situation. Moreover, the 
University of Monroe was at that time at the highest 

[152] 



THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

point of its effectiveness and power. It had been 
neither crippled by legislative interference nor dark- 
ened and distraught by war j it was as nearly as pos- 
sible the free seat of learning of a strong and hopeful 
democracy. Hence I felt something of a freedom and a 
power that I had sought elsewhere in vain. What 
helped me in addition was that, from the first, I proved 
to be a very successful teacher. It is worth while 
(dwelling for a moment on this fact. If I have harsh 
things to say of our whirring educational machine, 
they do not spring from the uneasiness of personal 
irritation. From that first fall in Monroe to 
the end of my academic career eight years later, 
I had in the fullest measure possible among us, the 
reward that makes a teacher's life endurable — the loy- 
alty and the gratitude of my students. I exacted of 
them always their best work and straightest thinking; 
I tolerated no cheap phrases or tribal formularies in 
my class-room. Hence my colleagues soon thought me 
a little more showy than safe. The students never 
failed me — in Monroe or Central City, in peace or war. 
Why did I leave Monroe? Vollberg begged me to 
stay. Ellard, in the grip of an intimate tragedy, 
needed me. The Dean was persuasive. Well, certain 
responsibilities, which shall be nameless, had to be 
faced and every penny was important. I had been 
so happy in Monroe that a strong instinct in me re- 
belled against making it the scene of penury, grime 
and chagrin. Also, a wild restlessness often came 
over me when I remembered the more than thousand 
miles that stretched between my mother and myself. 
My old life in which I was so deeply rooted, my own 
past and my family's, which I had come to see with a 

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UP STREAM 

now warmth and sympathy and compassion — all that 
seemed terribly far away and almost blot tod out here. 
Thus an acute poacolessness stirred always at the 
core of mo. At all events, when a friend ia the de- 
partment was called to the chairmanship of the de- 
partment in Central City and asked me to go with him, 
I accepted the offer, though not without doubt and 
hesitation. 

Mary and I raised money somehow, went for a few 
brief weeks to Queenshaven and came to Central City 
to establish ourselves. That establishment was slow 
and difficult and never complete. We had both been 
accustomed to richer and racier forms ol' life than we 
found in that characteristic city of the Middle West, to 
a more flexible society, a freer air. But we were de- 
stined to stay there for six years. It was there that I 
watched the color of life and brooded upon death and 
war and felt the pang- of youth leaving my heart ; there 
I wrote several books that brought mo some small re- 
pute and sat in final judgment on my poetry. There, 
too, I thought at one time that I had learned the les- 
son of resignation. . . . 



I applied myself to the business of education. To 
what we, in America, call the higher education of the 
most democratic typo. For the university o\' Central 
City is a state institution. It is coeducational. There 
are between five and six thousand students and a fac- 
ulty of nearly five hundred. The university is divided 
into eight chief colleges to all but one of which — the 
college of medicine— a graduation certificate from a 

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THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

high school admits the student. In a word, any boy or 
girl in the state who has completed a high school course 
may go to Central City and learn anything within the 
whole realm of human knowledge which may seem most 
effective in developing the individual. These state 
universities represent a handsome ideal. If the teach- 
ing were not propaganda, if the teachers were not 
slaves. ... Yet from these universities fiery things . 
may one day come. Not now. Let me remember. . . . 
I stroll on the campus in spring as I have done 
many times. The students are not disturbed by my 
approach, for they stand in no particular awe of their 
professors. Those that know me go on with their con- 
versation, simply including me in it if I stop. They 
know that my attitude is always comradly. I watch 
their faces. There is not a vicious face on the campus. 
I try to recall one among the hundreds of students I 
have taught. I cannot. Dull faces, vacant faces. Not 
one that expresses any corruption of heart and mind. 
I look about me again and watch for one face that be- 
trays a troubled soul, a yearning of the mind, the 
touch of any flame. There is none. How many such 
faces have I seen in class-room or campus? I count 
them: one, two, three — well, four. I must except the 
handful of Russian Jews. Thought and emotion are 
their birthright. But my young Americans? Many of 
the girls are dainty and comely. The peasant is oblit- 
erated here in a single generation. The boys have 
bright and cheery faces — rather more flattened and 
less salient, upon the whole, than the girls'. A little 
coarser in modelling and tinting. But all, all incur- 
ably trivial. I listen to their talk. It is of games, 
parties, examinations. Never of the contents of the 

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tests. But of the practical fact that they have to be 
faced. Who has ever heard an eager argument among 
these students on any of the subjects — art, religion, 
economics, sex — that are supposed to employ the minds 
of men? Who has ever seen them keen about any- 
thing except (symbolically speaking) football and 
fudge? It is, as a matter of fact, considered rather 
bad form among them to show any stirring of the mind. 
It is considered " high-brow,' ' queer, that is to say — 
different, personal and hence, by a subtle and quite 
mad implication consoling to stupidity and emptiness 
— undemocratic. 

A Continental would ask: Why do they go to 
the university? In Central City comparatively few 
went for social reasons. An extraordinary proportion 
of the students earn their maintenance wholly or in 
part. They and their parents make real sacrifices in 
the cause of education. I found few of those young 
men and women really slack and trifling. There was 
practically no disciplinary problem. The students 
came to the class-room to learn something. I have 
seen both French and German friends speechless be- 
fore that contradiction. But gradually I fought my 
way to its true meaning which is this : To the ' ' aver- 
age, intelligent American" education, for which he is 
willing to deny himself and pay taxes, means — skill, 
information — at most, accomplishment. Skill and 
knowledge with which to conquer the world of matter. 
It does not mean to him an inner change — the putting 
on of a new man, a new criterion of truth, new tastes 
and other values. The things he wants at the univer- 
sity are finer and more flexible tools for the economic 
war which he calls liberty. And like tools or weapons 

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/ 

THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

they are external to him and are dropped when the 
class-room period or the working day are over. He 
then merges himself again into the great level of the 
democratic mass from which he strives to be distin- 
guished only; by the possession of those sharper tools. 
By his outlook upon life, his distinction of taste, his 
finer palate for truth he would hesitate to be differen- 
tiated from his fellows. He would seem to himself in 
danger of being a "high-brow" and a snob. Occa- 
sionally I used to hear a gifted student, alive to the 
deeper meaning of the humanities, passionately dis- 
claim the values he had himself attained in a blind 
terror of non-conformity. And I heard students say, 
hot once or twice: "But the majority is of another 
opinion ; I 'm probably wrong. ' ' And why not ? There 
was the President of the university in Central City 
who led the way. 

The man has been on my mind all these years. And 
the other day I made a record of him and of his mean- 
ing. 

During a recent crisis of our national history a 
certain distinguished citizen of my acquaintance — 
college president, insurance magnate, farmer, and 
merchant — announced with an indescribable unction: 
"My opinion is that of the average American. " His 
broad lips tightened and his eyes became stony. He 
turned up his sleeves, figuratively speaking, to enforce 
his own loyalty upon all within his power. For loyalty 
is what he called it and had always called it. He had 
been loyal to his college and to his college-team, to his 
party — the Republican — his state, his city and his 
church. He had always acted from within a group and 

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had always identified himself with that group 's opinion 
of itself and with its attitude to other groups. The 
qualities of these other groups he had always loyally 
excluded from his experience. He had never permitted 
himself really to see the rival team, the competing in- 
stitution, or the other party. No wonder then that he 
swept aside with a muscular gesture a suggestion that 
he should, in this supreme moment, envisage humanity 
as at least including the alien and hostile tribe. Once 
somebody asked him: "Then you interpret loyalty 
to a social group— college, church, city, nation — as an 
identification of- one's own opinion with the majority 
opinion held within that group at the quite arbitrary 
moment when the group chooses to apply a test?" He 
became truculent and oratorical. The question had 
simply not reached his mind. His very conception of 
loyalty had involved the submersion of his reason. He 
was impenetrable. 

And yet to my own knowledge, in the ordinary, con- 
crete matters of daily living this man was both wise 
and just. The old experiences of the race that had 
recurred within his own life he had grasped firmly, 
and concerning these his judgment was liberal and 
ripe. He had been poor in his earlier years and his 
underpaid colleagues found him to be both understand- 
ing and helpful; he had been married several times 
and had a saner insight than many supposed into the 
intricate relations of men and women. He had, in all 
such matters, an occasional bluntness of speech that 
proved him to be free from the grosser delusions of his 
fellows. "Wherever his personal experience guided his 
judgment, that judgment was sound. On all other mat- 
ters he talked like a child or a madman and, at critical 

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THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

moments, fell back upon the mass judgment of men 
whose opportunities for experience were even more 
restricted than his own. This process he called "loy- 
alty" and it gave him the mien and temjjer of an in- 
quisitor. In his personal life he experienced and rea- 
soned from experience; the motives of his political 
actions were savage and confused. 

It seems to me that this man's character is a sym- 
bol. Judgments formed without experience are vain and 
in the void. But mankind has evidently not the power 
of transmitting experiences that do not repeat them- 
selves within the actual life of each generation. The 
simplest know that fire burns and snow chills and even 
that thrift makes for order. But so soon as intervals 
elapse between experiences they are either obliterated 
or transformed into romance. The ages pass and war 
follows war. Mankind has not learned that the blow 
returned does not heal the pain of the blow suffered, 
neither does it touch the impulse that aimed the blow, 
nor cure the suffering from which that impulse leaped, 
nor make order of the moral chaos in which the suf- 
fering was born. It follows that all judgments in re- 
gard to war and peace, all corporate or collective judg- 
ments in moments of crisis and on matters that have 
not been constant factors in the lives of the individuals 
who compose the group are wholly and necessarily 
worthless. You may call an acquiescence in such judg- 
ments by ringing names — teamwork, loyalty, patriot- 
ism. It remains a savage thing and the chief enemy 
in our path. 

What are we to do? Have not even historians, 
warders of the rarer experiences of the race, failed us 
at crises ? The answer lies here, so at least it seems to 

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me ; we can not change the nature of man, but we can 
affect his mood. Christianity did that for some cen- 
turies, the ideal of economic co-operation does so to- 
day. We can attack the concept of loyalty as excluding 
inquiry and experience; we can seek to merge the 
mind's freedom with its own self-respect. We can be- 
gin humbly. When the leader of the school foot-ball 
team announces certain victory based on nothing but 
his craving to show the superiority of his particular 
group, his teachers can explain the spiritual vulgarity 
of that impulse, insist on an imaginative grasp of the 
rival team's likeness to his own and thus temper the 
ferocity of the merely competitive instincts. We can 
deprecate all forms of "booming" and "boosting"; 
we can point out a humility which is also a nobler form 
of pride. We can substitute a sense of personal and 
inner worth for the misery and emptiness that fling the 
individual into blind group-action to satisfy his primi- 
tive will to superiority and power. We can show that 
judgment without experience will wreck a society as 
surely as it will wreck an individual, and that loyalty 
to the humblest truth a man has found for himself 
is better than to cheer whole acres of bunting or to 
wear a gaudy ribbon in his coat. 

^f ■«■ *n* *W "ir IP w W 

Our students, then, came to the university not to 
find truth, but to be engineers or farmers, doctors or 
teachers. They did not want to be different men and 
women. It is in conformity with this popular purpose 
that the elective system of studies has been pushed 
back from the college into the high-school and that 
state universities have been compelled, by actual legis- 
lation is some cases, to admit high-school graduates 

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THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

simply by virtue of a definite amount of study with- 
out distinction of content or quality. The recent intro- 
duction of psychological tests when it is not, as in 
certain private universities of the East, a weapon 
against radicals and Jews, can be made to function in 
precisely the same way. And I do not say that, given 
the aim, the system is not practical. If the aim of edu- 
cation is merely to gain rough, useful tools for striv- 
ing with the world of matter, and to gain them rap- 
idly — the system works. I suppose that these state 
universities do turn out very fair engineers and farm- 
ers and veterinarians. But when their job leaves 
these men free they are but little different from people 
who have not gone to college. They go to foolish plays, 
read silly magazines and fight for every poisonous 
fallacy in politics, religion and conduct. A professor 
of geology in the university of Central City was pub- 
licly converted by Billy Sunday. The fact that he was 
not thereupon privately "fired," that he was still 
thought capable of teaching his science, symbolized the 
situation in its naked horror. 

in 

One or two of my colleagues and I were wont, in 
our interpretation of literature and thought, to speak 
freely in the class-room of those deep and serious mat- 
ters concerning which it befits men and women to 
think all their lives. A few students — a very few — 
followed our leading. A number, also small, offered 
a sullen resistance. The majority considered us inter- 
esting, stimulating, a little quaint, and regarded these 
lectures as pleasant exercitations which had no con- 

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tact with reality. A student, for example, would take 
advanced courses in philosophy and literature and re- 
turn, with no sense of discrepancy, to the formularies 
of a third-rate conventicle. Another, a girl with a face 
full of intelligence and vivid sweetness, ' 'majored" in 
French literature. She knew the language well and 
had read widely. But Montaigne and Anatole France 
never spoke to her. Her real interest was in Y. W. 
C. A. work and she was anxious to become a mission- 
ary. Her one desire was to save the followers of 
Buddha through the doctrines of the Fifth Street Bap- 
tist Church. 

This phenomenon was a recurrent one. So let me 
repeat : Our people do not believe in education at all — 
if education means a liberation of the mind or a height- 
ened consciousness of the historic culture of mankind. 
Philosophy and morals are taken care of by the Fifth 
Street Baptist Church. College is to fit you to do 
things — build bridges, cure diseases, teach French. It 
is not supposed to help you to be. 

Convictions on all ultimate questions our students 
brought with them ready-made or continued deliber- 
ately to draw from sources other than ourselves. And 
these convictions constitute the most rigid and the 
palest inner culture by which, I suppose, any society 
has ever tried to live. I wonder whether I can de- 
scribe this inner culture objectively. I know it almost 
tangibly. For years I read it in the eyes of my stu- 
dents, noted it in all their reactions, bruised myself 
daily against its dull and vicious edges. If I under- 
stood this ethos rightly, it holds that the aim and end 
of life is happiness in terms of blameless prosperity. 
It very sincerely distrusts intensity or distinction of 

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THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

mind and carelessness of material success. These 
things make for error and do not make for prosperity. 
It does not believe in virtue — virtus, power, the crea- 
tive instinct in the intellectual or moral world — but 
wholly in such negative commandments as will con- 
tribute to honest material well-being. You must not 
drink fermented liquors, you must not criticize your 
neighbor harshly, you must not — except in business 
where the contrary is the supreme law — act selfishly; 
you must not doubt that America has achieved an un- 
exampled freedom nor that the majority is right — 
"they say: 'the majority rules ' " — and hence you must 
shun non-conformity to the fundamental beliefs of the 
majority as undemocratic and un-American. Also as 
un-Christian. For the Churches have substituted pro- 
hibition for saintliness and a state of economic com- 
petition in which blamelessness achieves prosperity 
for the kingdom of God. 

How, it will be asked, can such convictions — so 
hum-drum, so middle-aged, so unheroic — armor as 
with steel the impassioned spirit of youth? Alas, youth 
in Central City had no rebellions or curiosities or 
yearnings. Young things there were not wild things. 
Adolescents neither wrote verse nor broke idols. A 
thoughtful physician assured me that nine-tenths of 
those young Americans with their untroubled eyes and 
steady gaze were under sexed. And I found a weighty 
confirmation in this: it was practically impossible, in 
studying literature, to get an emotional response. 
Those students had no emotional experience. Their 
inner lives were supremely poverty-stricken. Nothing 
in them cried out. In addition, their morality is one 
of restraint and negation. So that whatever feeble 

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sparks of personality might smoulder here and there 
are smothered by the morals and beliefs of the mass- 
li]fe. Thus personality itself came to seem almost 
wicked and propriety synonymous with goodness. If 
they could live so quietly in a moral world which 
seemed to have no contact with reality, it was because 
reality in them had little sharpness or insistence. They 
had become what home and church and school wanted 
them to be. The ideal of conformity, of colorlessness, 
of taking the world to be a tame and shop-keeping sort 
of affair had been achieved. . . . 

Democracy was — was it not? — to set the individual 
free, to make room in the world for all types of per- 
sonality, to make life comradly, vivid, flexible? My 
students had one positive instinct. It was quiet and 
it never became cruel. But it was unbreakable: the 
instinct of intolerance. They were quietly intolerant 
of all qualitative distinctions — even in themselves. I 
said to a class of seniors: "High-brow is usually a 
term applied by ignorant people to those whose finer 
qualities and insights they should seek to emulate." 
My class laughed in its pleasant, courteous way. An 
hour later in the library I witnessed this scene. A 
blond, tousle-headed lad, my chief comfort during a 
certain year, was trying to sell copies of a magazine 
which, with the help of the Russian Jewish students, 
he had tentatively established. The magazine was 
crude enough. But it was alive. There was verse in 
it, unrhythmed and gawky, but hopeful, and prose with 
some close thinking in it and a social outlook and a 
breath of the future. My friend Jim smiled at me 
and shouted: "Buy the second number of The Torch!'' 
One of my seniors passed, the daughter of a federal 

[164] 



THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

judge. She shook her smooth, comely head with a self- 
satisfied little grin: "Too high-brow for me!" There 
was an inimitably characteristic little upward inflec- 
tion on the last word. She bought The Sly-Cat — the 
students ' comic paper — you may be sure, and laughed 
over its unspeakable inanities. It was natural, you 
say. The act — yes. But the spirit of the act! She 
refused The Torch with self-righteous triumph and 
read The Sly-Cat with a solid sense of doing the right 
thing — because it was the ordinary thing. She had 
made a fetish of commonness — except in the matter 
of money and clothes and motor-cars. So had they 
all. . . . 

IV 

If they had met a solid front when they came to 
Central City, had met detachment, resistance, the 
critical and distinguishing mind! But the university 
caters to the High Schools and these to the grade 
schools and the grade schools to what the hardware- 
man and the undertaker think their Johns and Wes- 
leys and Ruths and Helens ought to learn. Here is 
the incurable dilemna of democracy. A democratic- 
community, in order to be free, wise, self -governed, 
needs minds that are so — minds that will think closely, 
resist delusions, discriminate and really will and 
choose. An historic and philosophic culture is, in a 
democracy, no longer a luxury or an accomplishment. 
It is a bitter necessity. Lacking it, the group-life ia 
at the mercy of every odious folly, of every brazen 
demagogue, of every machine-boss, of every catch- 
word. . . . But how shall we persuade our masters, 
the hardwareman and the undertaker, that what John 

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and Wesley need for good citizenship, for honest citi- 
zenship, in the plain and literal sense, is not more skill, 
bnt history, philosophy, economics, literature — a spir- 
itual background, a sense of values, a vision of man's 
life, of " Florence, Weimar, Athens, Rome?" It can 
not be done. The sage can be disinterested and so can 
the proletarian. The undertaker and the hardwaremam 
striving always to be managers of a casket trust or 
a plow share monopoly, are hopelessly committed to 
the economic and intellectual status quo. Hence a 
bourgeois democracy is rigid. This is its dilemma. 
Whoever possesses or hopes to possess more than he 
needs, more than a house, a garden, a room full of 
books, is doomed to keeping static the order in which 
he lives. 

Well, in our present system of education the de- 
crees of the hardwareman and the undertaker have 
been carried out. Thus, in Central City, there are 
charming buildings for the school of veterinary medi- 
cine, handsome and commodious ones for agriculture 
and engineering, domestic science, chemistry and for- 
estry. The ancient arts and studies of man that give 
vision and wisdom are squeezed in somehow. The stu- 
dents see all that and it falls in with the notions they 
already have of what is -useful and what is not. They 
tolerate the required Freshman English because of a 
dim something connected with business letters and ad- 
vertising "dope." Their spoken English remains, as 
a matter of fact, hopelessly corrupt. They used to 
elect German because a "lot of science is written in 
German." The war rather eased them of that dis- 
cipline. Spanish, more recently, is chosen on account 
of a vague notion about the South American trade. The 

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THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

proof of the reality of these motives is that in Central 
City there was never more than one small section of 
Italian. No science there that they know of, no busi- 
ness either. The advanced courses in language and 
literature, including English, are filled with girls who 
can afford the agreeable and the useless. Greek is 
dead. Latin is still studied by a handful of young 
women who teach it in High School because "there's 
so much Latin in English and so many scientific terms 
are Latin." The reason of spiritual poltroonry. In 
another generation the classics of the English tongue 
will be as obsolete as a cuneiform inscription. 

"A new Peneus rolls his fountains 

Against the evening star ! ' ' 

Think of that and the Middle Western student mind. 
It is a murmur from an unimagined and unimaginable 
world. The hardwareman and the undertaker have 
triumphed. And their triumph is sustained in the 
courts of last resort. The Rockefeller Institute has 
made the most brazen attack on the humanities on 
record. No wonder! What is wanted is the skilled 
hand and the unresisting mind. A democracy of clever 
workers incapable of close thinking, ignorant of 
the experience of the race, can be dragged from one 
delusion to another, given the shadow for the sub- 
stance, brow-beaten and enslaved. Yet it can, all the 
while, be gulled into a belief in its own freedom. Men 
must have heroes. The masters of steel and oil and 
their henchmen know that. But Milton and Shelley, 
Kant and Goethe are dangerous heroes. Edison is a 
safe one. . . . We used to argue that a civilized mind 
would make even an engineer a better engineer. But 

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the capitalistic state does not want excellent engineers 
quite so much as it wants many engineers. It wants 
degrees and college graduates by the thousand. . . . 

To keep what little hope I had, what impulse 
toward my work, I found it necessary to stop going 
to commencement. One year we had eight hundred 
graduates ; we conferred eight hundred degrees. The 
long line passed in cap and gown. Seventy per cent 
should never have gotten here. Seventy per cent could 
stand no test — not the simplest — in fundamental think- 
ing or judging or the elements of humane knowledge. 
But the system is not a sieve; it's a cornucopia. . . . 
The faces . . . the faces . . . unformed, unstamped 
by any effort of thought. And then the band and the 
ribbons and the smug, fond parents and the revolting 
orators — cheap clergymen as a rule — who shout that 
this institution is sending forth into life the trained 
and chosen heralds of civilization. . . . Trained and 
chosen! Good Lord! Even with our enforced slack- 
ness, how did most of these raw young fools slide 
through ? And since they did how, in the name of our 
as, I once thought, common nature, did they escape 
after four mortal years so uncontaminated by wisdom 
and understanding! 



It is clear that I have omitted so far what was a 
powerful factor in our situation — a faculty of nearly 
five-hundred. Could this group of men affect noth- 
ing? Could it in no sense lead the democracy toward 
better impulses and stricter standards ? There was a 
time when I would have said yes. But the war came 

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THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

and, as we shall see — it is indeed notorious — these gen- 
tlemen went to pieces. But even before the war the 
trouble with the American professorate was its cow- 
ardice and its effeminacy of mind. Two men there 
were on that campus in Central City who in public 
writing and private speech stood four-square against 
the pulpiness and muddled utilitarianism of our educa- 
tional machine. Just two — my friend, the professor 
of philosophy and I. Others agreed with us quite sin- 
cerely. We prodded them in vain. My friend is of 
British extraction and I of Jewish. We were free of 
that infinitely curious, characteristic American trait — 
the easy-going, kindly, disastrous dislike of clean-cut 
individual convictions. I emphasize the word indi- 
vidual. When the war came these lambs roared like 
lions. But then they roared in herds. In the old days 
they had no convictions. If they had them they would 
not express them. Because, observe, if you have a 
conviction and express it, you are by that very fact 
contradicting someone who thinks otherwise. And 
suppose — though he hasn't whispered on the subject 
— that other one is the dean of your college! You 
might "hurt his feelings!" Let the republic slide to 
the devil. But don't let us hurt anyone's feelings. 
My friend and I used often to feel almost truculent 
when we were barely self-respecting. Our colleagues 
were as tepid as weak tea. ... At the faculty lan- 
guage and literature club no one ever exercised sharp 
criticism of another's paper or report. Truth? Sci- 
ence? It takes "aliens" to get excited over such 
things. And at nine-thirty they grew restive. They 
were expected at home. The consummate terror in 
which they stood of their uninteresting wives gave the 

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last touch to the picture of their moral and intellectual 
futility. 

There are deeper reasons for the lack of intellectual 
hardihood that marks our university faculties. Who 
and what are these American professors? They are, 
almost all, honorable and high-minded gentlemen. 
They try, in a feeble way, to live up to the best light 
they have, although, as Arnold said of their ancestors, 
they're criminally careless about inquiring whether 
that light is not darkness. But they are not men 
driven by an inner urgency. They are not the servants 
of an idea or of a passion of the soul. Most of them 
could easily have been something else. They went into 
teaching either because they had a pleasant taste for 
learning and no particular taste for anything else; 
or because they were timid and of a retiring nature 
and didn't like the rough and tumble of the business 
world. Or, because — in an appalling number of cases 
— they simply drifted into the academic life. Thus 
there is among them littlei intensity or power, little 
courage or independence, much pinch-beck dignity and 
lust for administrative twaddle. 

The argument used to be current on that campus, 
as it is on every campus, that strong men do not enter 
the academic profession because there are no prizes in 
it. "We were, it is true, wretchedly poor. That pov- 
erty has increased year by year. Nor were we re- 
warded by any great dignity of social standing or ap- 
proval. Yet the argument was and remains but a 
shallow one. The youth whose whole being is one con- 
suming and unanswerable passion for literature or 
science or philosophy, who shrinks at the very thought 
of business or money-getting, cannot be deterred from 

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THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

the academic life by its slender rewards. For he seeks 
and chooses that life in order to live at all. He must 
choose it at whatever salary. No ; the ' ' strong man in 
business'' argument is a fallacy. That strong man 
could never have been the academic strong man. His 
capability of being what he is is proof enough. He 
did not, by an unescapable compulsion, love best the 
eternal things of the mind. If he did, he couldn't be 
spending his time in anything so trivial as making 
money by multiplying or exchanging things. . . . The 
best men in the university are those who couldn't pos- 
sibly have been anything else. They are the ones whom 
a wise polity would not condemn to humiliating penury. 
They are the brains and the souls and the hope of the 
land. The mere teachers, who might as easily have 
been bank-officials or commission-merchants, are not to 
be pitied. Let them be other things for a few academic 
generations. Then perhaps the chosen servants of the 
eternal life will come into their own. . . . But try to 
urge that on a given campus. Do you mean So and 
So should go? Exactly! But he is such a good hus- 
band ! "Which means that the poor man is not only an 
ass but a feebly uxorious ass. . . . 

It goes without saying that the majority of those 
who drift into the academic life are dreary specialists 
with, angular, strawy minds. They often teach their 
subjects competently in the narrow, technical sense, 
but without richness or savor or human and philo- 
sophical implications. Yet that is what the American 
student supremely needs. He needs the electric touch 
of personality; he gets uncoordinated information. 
But many of my colleagues really had a kind of Phar- 
isaism in this matter. Their attitude was : this is my 

[1711 



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specialty; I am master of it; I don't pretend to more 
and distrust those who do. In the early years — I grew 
wary later — a colleague once asked me : ' ' What 's your 
special line?" He knew, of course, that I was teach- 
ing German. He meant : do I specialize in the sixteenth 
century or the eighteenth, the Middle High German, 
lyric or the Renaissance drama. I wasn't thinking of 
his psychology and answered: "Oh, in some moods 
I'm sorry I'm not teaching English, but I find German 
literature more and more sustaining as time goes on. 
Of course, there are advantages in — " The good man's 
look of cool and incredulous amazement cut my inno- 
cent outpourings short. 

vi 

The actual business of teaching was often dreary 
enough. Largely because there was no proper division 
of work. I taught a section of beginners and conducted 
a seminar for candidates for the doctorate. I taught 
intermediate classes. In a word, I was high school 
teacher, college teacher, university professor on the 
same day. I had constantly to practice and apply to 
my subject three utterly different methods. The wear 
and tear of that was great. It made against concen- 
tration and harmony and hence effectiveness. There 
was also a terrible amount of sheer, heart-breaking 
waste. The elective system permits a student to take 
just enough of a subject to illumine his special and 
general ignorance. But I dare say that a qualitative 
differentiation of work for the professors or compul- 
sion upon the student to master something would both 
have been considered undemocratic and are so consid- 

[172] 



THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

ered now. "When I used to present such considerations 
my friends often thought me a pessimist, one who sees 
life with a jaundiced eye. They had an eighteenth 
centuryish kind of cheer. This is the best of all pos- 
sible worlds. In our easy-going, democratic way we 
shall muddle through. Through? Yes. But in what 
direction? To what goal? Well, here we are in 1921. 
The best civilization on the old Continent is dying. 
We are fat and also the reactionaries, the Black Hun- 
dreds, of the world. My friends in Central City are, I 
swear, capable of not knowing or not permitting them- 
selves to know either, but of still trying to muddle 
through with optimistic phrases. . . . 

Yet my very pessimism sustained me, urged me on 
to new efforts, to the daily service of the cause. How- 
ever tired I was, however discouraged, once in the 
class-room I felt an energy that never quite failed me. 
There might have been on that day one student — if 
but one who heard me in the deeper sense and ac- 
cepted, however imperfectly, the spirit of my teaching 
— one who at least in the years to come would realize 
through memory that once in his youth he had heard 
a summons from the common and the mean, a protest 
against the obliteration of all freer and finer values, a 
call to become a member of that small company of elect 
spirits who have been, in every age, the guardians of 
the torch of the true humanities. For it is by its pro- 
duction of such a company of spirits that a civilization 
stands or falls. Number and size are a monstrous de- 
lusion, machinery is a snare, wealth is trash. ... A 
society which, as a whole, venerates Edison more than 
Emerson is in danger of becoming a society of damned 
souls in the only sense in which damnation has a 

[173] 



UP STREAM 

meaning. What a platitude. Only, unfortunately, it 
isn't a platitude in America — -it's heretical nonsense. 
In America, observe ! Not among those Swedish and 
German and Levantine and Irish critics and writers in 
New York whose influence upon the civilization of their 
native land is beginning to trouble the patriots. . . . 

In my moments of half -humorous despair I used to 
tell myself that my fine phrases did, at least, square 
with the brutal fact. There never was more than one 
.such student to be found. Not in a class, but in a year. 
So and so many young women, of course, went through 
the gesture of understanding. But the gestures were 
quite like those they made at receptions — elegant con- 
ventions by which to hide the true state of their minds. 
Or else their reactions were sentimental. After an 
energetic lecture on the ethical problem in Faust, an 
immense, buxom, blank-faced young woman came lan- 
guishing to my desk : ' ' Oh, Professor, you give me such 
a beautiful feeling!" Such moments were discourag- 
ing. They took the wind out of one's sails. I used to 
cherish the ambition to teach at an institution for men 
only. ... 

Yet I shall not end this chapter upon so negative a 
note. A I said at the beginning: My students were 
very loyal to me. "Whether they understood me or 
not — usually they didn't — whether I was teaching 
them language or literature, they felt that I was bent 
upon some business in which their souls were somehow 
really concerned. That much nearly all of them saw; 
for that perception they were nearly all a little grate- 
ful. So that, in addition to conveying a certain amount 
of knowledge, I at least did this during my seven years 
as a college teacher: I caused a number of young 

[174] 



THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION 

Americans of the Middle West to regard with liking 
and respect one who was frankly merciless to the 
popular fallacies and the mass delusions amid which 
they had to live. 

I earned my small salary upon austerer terms than 
most of my colleagues. I gave myself, not only my 
knowledge of German. Nor was I idle during my brief 
leisure, full as that leisure often was of an intense 
anguish of body and mind. I wrote several books that 
brought me little money but carried the name of my 
university where it had not been heard before and 
also visibly caused juster and truer views of the sub- 
jects with which they dealt to prevail. I was, in brief, 
a citizen passionately and fruitfully concerned for the 
welfare of a society which had always received him 
grudgingly and half-heartedly, but which he had never- 
theless come to regard as his own. And because I 
would not join in a cosmic orgy of stupidity and slan- 
der, of foul myth and blood-soaked ritual I was finally 
held to be in that place of my activity a meaner citizen 
than any owner of leathern lungs and brazen lips. . . . 

A friend told me the other day that my name is a 
household word among the very cultured of Central 
City. They regard me and work as, in an 
intimate and delightful sense y their own. ... I 
didn't contradict the tepid little lady. Those people 
are capable of saying and feeling just that. The war 
is over. My reputation is growing. Why shouldn't 
they get a little pleasure and self-importance out of it? 
They have forgotten the year of grace 1917 when no 
hand but one was stretched out to help me, because I 
would not be a hypocrite and could not be a fool. 

[175] 



UP STREAM 

They're Anglo-Americans — these good people. They 
are quite sincere. They do not know the difference 
between truth and falsehood. If ever I visit Central 
City they are capable of giving a banquet — with grape- 
juice — in my honor. . . . 



[176] 



CHAPTER VIII. 
The Colob op Life 



In the seventh month of the first year of our stay 
in Central City there came a special delivery letter 
from my father. He wrote that I must come home for 
a few days at once, because my mother had to undergo 
an operation which could not be delayed. ... I want 
to describe these events without reticence. Literature 
has a way of veiling pain — of talking about it. We 
should look at pain as it is. If we are less furtive 
about it, perhaps we shall spend more of our strength 
trying to mend life, less trying to break each others' 
lives. . . . 

Mary tried to calm me. We had been in Queens- 
haven that summer and my mother had seemed, as she 
always did, in radiant health, preserving even then a 
faint touch of the coloring and the freshness of youth. 
But in my mind some dark, actually audible gong 
seemed to ring out. Then the body responded. A 
sweetish, gnawing sickness in the pit of the stomach; 
a bitter dryness in the throat and mouth. For several 
years that condition never left me. It returns often, 
to this day, at the most trifling anxiety. 

On the long journey South, caged in a sleeper, de- 

[177] 



UP STKEAM 

prived by a brutal tyranny of the tonic and relief of 
wine, I shook in an uninterrupted cold fever. I had 
no hope . . . Queenshaven looked like a toy city in an 
eerie dream, my father's white face contorted into a 
smile of welcome looked like a goblin's. "Mother is 
up, perfectly strong." He tried to put a reassuring 
note into this statement. But the trouble was — well? 
Yes, cancer. Far gone. In a most vital spot. I nearly 
doubled up with the sweetish gnawing in my entrails. 
I tried to speak, but my mouth seemed to be filled with 
lime. My father, patient and brave as always, re- 
minded me: "Mother is up, you understand. We 
must. ..." A fierce light flared up in my brain. ' ' Of 
course we must!" She wasn't going to the hospital 
till the next day. She wanted first to spend twenty- 
four hours with me. . . . 

She stood at the head of the stairs as always when 
I came home with the soft lamplight on her beautiful, 
white hair. But she was erect and her skin was smooth 
as a girl's. Only a touch of paleness. ... I put my 
arms about her and dared not weep. No, somewhere 
within me I, too, found the strength to play my part. 
We smiled and chatted and even ate. But all the while 
I had a queer sensation. I heard my voice and the 
words I spoke as though they came from another 
speaker in the farthest corner of the room. When- 
ever she left us alone, my father and I fell silent and 
our contorted faces relaxed and we rested as men 
catch their breath in the intervals of torture. . . . On 
the evening of that day — a calm, bland day — we drove 
her. to the infirmary. She was rather stunned and 
rather frightened. She had hardly ever known illness. 
But the room assigned seemed pleasant to her, the 

[178] 



THE COLOR OF LIFE 

special nurse was a sturdy, sensible Scotch girl and 
the Mother Superior who knew us and had some in- 
sight into our situation was quite perfect in her seri- 
ous, hopeful sweetness. . . . 

The operation, next morning, lasted for over an 
hour. My father and I walked up and down in front 
of the building. We lit one cigarette from another 
and paced and paced. We didn't say anything. Now 
and then we caught each others ' eyes and looked away 
quickly. We couldn't bear what we saw. At last the 
Mother Superior stood in the doorway. From her 
smile we knew that the operation had been successful. 
I couldn't smile back and she looked at me question- 
ingly. But I was beyond self-deception and easy con- 
solation and all the softer feelings by which people try 
to bear the unbearable. I knew that my mother, being 
strong, would probably stand the operation, however 
radical, well ; I knew that the surgeons were excellent. 
I also knew, however, that there wasn't a chance of 
the lymphatic system not being badly involved and 
that before many months my mother would die — would 
die by slow, intolerable poisoning, with all her hopes 
frustrated — would die before I had had a chance to 
bring any brightness to her saddened heart. My old 
race against fate and death was lost. 

I was able to stay for ten days. All day I sat be- 
side her. She was feeling quite well. We had long 
talks, her hand in mine. She had never taken the mor- 
bid interest in disease that is so common, and was full 
of hope for the future. So even these talks that made 
her happy were a long torment to me. The fatal truth 
kept beating in my head like a pulse. Then I had to 
go. . . . 

[179] 



UP STREAM 

The next six months ! Words are used up like dull, 
cracked, edgeless knives. They cannot cleave to those 
depths of pain in which, in the very centre of his being, 
without any reservation, a man desires his death. Dur- 
ing the first four months there was the added sting, 
the withering irony, of good reports and cheerful let- 
ters to write. It seemed — things being as they were — 
almost more merciful when she began to sicken — when 
she came to us to Central City, glad to be there, still 
not without hope, though very ill and broken. And it 
seemed more merciful, too, that when she could no 
longer raise herself up and her anguish became so 
acute as to require powerful narcotics — that then she 
sank more swiftly into exhaustion than our physicians 
had predicted and, on the noon of a brilliant October 
day, died in Mary's arms. In the coffin she looked young 
again and her face wore an expression of serenity 
and severe sweetness which I had not seen on it for 
many years. . . . 

During many weeks, as a matter of instinctive self- 
preservation, I sought refuge in certain idealistic as- 
sumptions and speculations. I re-read The Critique of 
the Practical Reason and even Browning. But it 
was merely the kind of gesture by which a man tries 
to ward off blows he is too weak to endure. The tenta- 
tive and half -prayerful aspiration toward some extra- 
mundane source of power and good which had re- 
mained with me from my Christian youth died out en- 
tirely. I saw the world in a harder and a drier mood. 
I lost my last shred of respect for all religious and 
ethical formulations — for all types of supernaturalism 
and absoluteness in thinking — for everything except 
such forms of beauty or freedom or justice as might 

[180] 



THE COLOR OF LIFE 

mitigate our stark wretchedness on earth. It seemed 
to me then, as it seems to me now, unspeakably mon- 
strous that, in a world where people are poisoned by 
cancer, they should persecute each other by social dis- 
tinctions, ill-apportioned wealth, ethical bickering or 
rob each other of a moment's peace in the brief, pitiful 
sunlight in the name of any absolutist formulary, legal 
or moral or religious. That sounds crude. But I am 
not writing a philosophical treatise. And I am sure 
that a description of the source in concrete experience 
from which most philosophic and all poetic visions of 
the sum of reality spring, would sound just as crude. 
In a word, I abandoned all faith in any form of per- 
sonal and transcendental idealism and gradually 
adopted the hope for economic security and personal 
freedom embodied in the revolutionary movement of 
our period. No, I am not, like a good many liberals, 
shirking the name of Socialism. But I would break 
with Socialism as swiftly as with any other system, if 
it were not to confine the power of society over the in- 
dividual strictly to the sphere of economics, hygiene 
and the necessity — not the character! — of education; 
if it were not to leave the personal and moral life of 
the individual absolutely free. I mean absolutely. I 
do not mean that hoary iniquity, that vile excuse for 
conscription and sex-slavery known as "liberty, oh, 
yes — but no licence." I mean that every man shall 
practice his own liberty, even though it seems licence 
to another. I want a world — to return to that burning 
symbol in my personal life — in which the beautiful, 
sensitive, gifted spirit of my mother would not have 
been warped and crippled by mean anxieties and social 
exclusions and absurd ethical inhibitions, but one in 



UP STREAM 

which she could have lived the years that the dark 
powers behind the veil permitted her in freedom and 
richness and the expansion of all her tastes and sensi- 
bilities. And I think this outlook on life well-estab- 
lished. It is not founded on speculation or tradition, 
but on the granite basis of a tragic fact. 

n 

So I became, naturally, more concerned with so- 
ciety and more watchful of it. Before this I had been 
almost wholly engrossed in art and thought and learn- 
ing. I now turned my attention upon this city and 
state in which I lived and on the way in which my fel- 
low-citizens were managing their affairs and mine. 

A mayor was to be elected. The city had then over 
two hundred thousand inhabitants. Its government 
entailed some very difficult engineering problems. 
Also, it was and is dispiriting in its ugliness. There 
was its' educational machine. There were other intri- 
cate matters. Now for this difficult office of mayor 
we had six candidates: a business man, a printer, a 
bank official, the chief of police, two lawyers. Let me 
omit the two lawyers. I knew little about them except 
the fact of their obscurity before election time and that 
neither had a chance of being elected. Of the other 
four, one of whom was elected, I can make certain very 
definite assertions: they knew nothing of municipal 
engineering, nothing of education, nothing of the ele- 
ments of even the conventional doctrines of political 
science, nothing of the experiments tried in the city- 
government of other countries. In a word, they had 
no equipment for the office to which they aspired. Nor 

[182] 



THE COLOR OF LIFE 

was it likely that these elderly, semi-illiterate men 
would equip themselves either during the brawling 
campaign months or during their two years in office. 
The stock reply of the conventional American is: 
Lincoln had no education either. True. But man- 
kind doesn't produce a certain type of moral genius 
by the thousand. It can produce well-trained and in- 
telligent officials. You cannot administer a common- 
wealth by waiting for miracles. Those four candi- 
dates, at all events, hadn't any claims to being demo- 
cratic saviors of society. On the contrary. They were 
men of the coarsest fibre — men with spiritually dead 
faces, with something gross and callous, impudent and 
yet furtive about their personalities and bearing. They 
exhibited a curious, I had almost said, family resem- 
blance in this respect. And it was ghastly to see how 
these men, in the poster photographs during the cam- 
paign, had tried to look the part expected of them — 
benevolent and honest, "smart" and burly. The pic- 
tures seemed to want to say to the voter: "Don't 
think I pretend to know more than you. I worked hard 
as a boy and supported my pore ol' mother. I never 
had no time for book- learnin'. But I've got a cer- 
tain amount of plain common sense, Mr. Voter, and 
business experience and these I want to put at your 
disposal. And I'm a jolly good fellow.' ' 

In their speeches and proclamations these four 
candidates made the same assertions. Each was going 
to give the city an honest administration — no graft — 
(as if that were a positive virtue, as if it weren't 
shameful that the voter should have to choose on that 
plane) — each was going to give us a clean city — (by 
which he meant making life a bit more difficult for a 

[183] 



UP STREAM 

few hundred prostitutes) — each was going to give us 
an efficient and economical administration. Very well. 
Only c every one knew that none of the men had the 
equipment or the purity of will to do either. As a mat- 
ter of fact the candidates wanted office either because 
they thought it would help them in a business way or 
through meanly personal ambition or because they had 
been accustomed to make their bread and butter out of 
a political job. Seeing their character, it was not diffi- 
cult to imagine what concessions and promises each 
made quite inevitably to the business men and finan- 
ciers who backed him and provided the machinery and 
funds for his campaign. 

All this sounds commonplace enough. And indeed 
it is. But I came upon it with a certain- freshness, a 
certain innocence, an ability to be shocked by the 
brazen and meaningless clatter of it. The world has 
moved since then. But the character of political gov- 
ernment in the affairs of cities and of states has not 
changed. Its purpose is to deceive the common folk 
and to fortify and extend the power of the privileged 
classes. And since power ultimately means economic 
power, since its one source is possession — possession 
of land, tools, means of transportation — it follows that, 
consciously or unconsciously, the whole function and 
intent of political government is to keep possession and 
hence power in the hands of those that now hold it. 
And since this oligarchy controls the press and thus 
controls both the news and opinion based on news, it is 
clear that its self -perpetuation will not be broken — has 
not been broken in any country — without some final 
catastrophe. 

[184] 



THE COLOR OF LIFE 
n 

Have we, I asked in those years, no directer expres- 
sion of the popular will. Yes. In matters that are 
non-political, therefore non-economic and so moder- 
ately indifferent to the possessing classes — in educa- 
tion (though even here, as I have shown, it is to the 
profit of the oligarchs to confirm popular folly) and 
in the government of the personal life of men. Every 
two years in those days the people of the state voted on 
a prohibition amendment to the constitution; every 
two years it was defeated by a smaller minority. To- 
day we have national prohibition. New York liberals 
wonder how it could have happened. They should 
have watched the paralysis of will and impulse creep- 
ing over a Middle Western state, a state full of what 
has recently become known as the "home-town." 

Each time the question came up I found my Anglo- 
American friends succumbing a little more and a little 
less willing to protest against the raucous propaganda. 
It became in the end almost "bad form." In the first 
place, twenty-one states were already dry — even Mich- 
igan. So the terrible fatalism of democracy, inherent 
in its worship of majority opinion and its fundamental 
rejection of qualitative distinctions was making itself 
felt more and more. If a disease spreads, expose your- 
self to it. Why should you want something better than 
others? I found my acquaintances almost so sodden 
in their folly. Furthermore — it was a question of 
morals and they had an unconquerable hesitation 
toward taking a negative attitude on a question of 
morals. Even those who were not at all fanatical and 
themselves drank were willing to let things take their 

[185] 



UP STREAM 

evil course: "It does nobody any good; it does some 
people harnij I mustn't be selfish. . . ;" They looked at 
me with estranged eyes when I said: "I'd be willing 
to take an oath never to touch fermented liquor again 
if only I could save our people from the infamy of pro- 
hibition. ' ' 

But most of my friends were, in some strange way, 
hypnotized by the fevered fanatics of the Anti-Saloon 
League and the Evangelical Churches. No one seemed 
to understand the character of these poor creatures. 
They can no longer bum witches or whip Quakers. 
They have somehow lost their grip on the devil of old. 
So they have made the substance known as ethyl al- 
cohol into an overshadowing myth — the evil thing in 
the world that must be fought and trodden under foot 
and exorcised by Christian men. Since they cannot 
quite in this age say that I am an unbelieving dog, 
they say — with sternly pitying and averted faces — that 
I shall die a drunkard. It is, of course, because in 
their savage and yet festering souls they have never 
caught a glimpse of the meaning of humane culture — 
choice, self-direction, a beautiful use of all things. 
These poor slaves of drink must either howl against it 
or reel in barrooms. One knows the type : thin-lipped, 
embittered by the poisons that unnatural repression 
breeds, with a curious flatness about the temples, with 
often, among the older men, a wiry, belligerent beard. 
You have seen them with their shallow-bo ssomed, ill- 
favored wives — stern advocates of virtue — walking on 
Sunday self-consciously to church. The wine they have 
never tasted, the white beauty they have never seen, 
the freedom of art they have never known — all their 

[186] 



THE COLOR OF LIFE 

unconscious hungers have turned to gall and worm- 
wood in their crippled souls. 

Yet to these maimed creatures — a bodily cripple 
is a more wholesome sight — my friends in Central 
City yielded more and more. They yielded to them 
in all matters. A film was shown down town that Mary 
and I wanted to see. It was useless. Before we could 
go, the secretary of the Lord's Day Association had 
caused it to be mutilated in the interest of our moral 
being. ... I wanted to buy another copy of Dreiser's 
The Genius. It had been forbidden by the Society for 
the Prevention of Vice. I am not able, as some of my 
liberal New York friends are, to take a humourous 
view of this situation. To take that view of it is to be 
in danger of supineness. Consider the matter clearly : 
We are helpless against any irresponsible person who 
shouts: Morality, Purity, the Home. Yet precisely 
these difficult and rigid concepts must be broken before 
a ray of civilization can light our gloom. For en- 
tangled in them, tightly woven into them, is an amount 
of concrete human tyranny, concrete human suffering 
— days of despair and nights of agony — that is prob- 
ably unexampled in history. The emotional acceptance 
of these concepts has diminished even where a help- 
lessness of the mind curbs the formation of a conscious 
protest. The result is dumb misery and perversion 
and the sickening and putrefaction of the impulses of 
will and sex. "When psychical explosions come, they 
necessarily take the form of war, hate, persecution, 
lynching. Degraded by the oppression of Moralty and 
Purity and the Home — in their current meanings — ■ 
men summon the evil passions bred by their degrada- 
tion to defend its instruments. . . . 

[187] 



UP STREAM 

IV 

In our early years in Central City Mary and I used 
to go out into society a good deal. Later we acquired 
a reputation for refusing invitations. I could endure 
no more. For what was the use of going to places if 
other people only sent their clothes and maimers and 
left their real selves at home. It was, at best, a pan- 
tomime, a ceremony, a decorative device, I cannot say 
that most of our acquaintances in Central City were 
successful decorations. Stereotyped phrases fluttered 
in the air; ice-cream was served. The phrases sick- 
ened me ; so did the ice-cream. 

"What wore on me most was the appalling mental 
vacuity. People said they were having a pleasant 
time. Some lied. Others had sunk so low that their 
remark was true. Since I, as a teacher and writer, 
was supposed to have an official connection with the 
arts, the women talked art at me — poetry and the 
drama. Cold chills used to run down my spine. "Art, 
my good ladies, is not what you suppose: it's not a 
game — like bridge; it's not a ceremony — like a recep- 
tion. It is the record and clarification of deepest 
human experience. It raises into permanence and 
beauty for our contemplation the experience of man 
upon his way. Think of the day you saw your mother 
die, of the hours you lay in bitter labor with your first- 
born, of the moment when you came, a virgin, to a 
man's embrace. These are sources of art. Or have 
you ever been hungry or an outcast or fought single- 
handed in a good cause?" If I had ever said that! 
"Don't you think, doctor, that X. is a wonderful 
writer?" "Of course, you ought to know, but I think. . . 

[188] 



THE COLOR OF LIFE 

tliink. ..." So they twittered and chirped — elderly 
women, too, mothers who ought to have come into some 
earnestness with the years. They had. Only the life 
of art and of the intellect is not a serious matter to 
them and their kind. Money is a serious matter. So- 
cial position is another. Health is a third. Then why, 
in God's name, didn't they talk money and social posi- 
tion and disease? Why were they not a little truthful? 
I don't care about money and social position and I 
hate to talk about disease except when I must and then 
to a doctor. Yet everything human is interesting, so 
it be forthright and comes from a deep source. . . . 
But that's bad form. "Oh, I thought your lecture last 
week so stimulating." She probably lied and I felt 
like asking her what my lecture was about. Instead I 
had to grin over my abominable ice-cream and say with 
the proper intonation: "So nice of you to have come 
to it. ' ' No, I abandoned that sort of thing and went, 
instead, to a public-house with a friend. It was so 
much more decent. Of course, I was popularly 
credited with a tinge of vulgarity. But the people 
forgave me. Even those who didn't, never let Mary 
feel it. Until the war came they were kindly enough. 
. . . The men, at these affairs, were largely background. 
They followed the lead of the women. There was a 
touch of mild, middle-aged archness.^ Flirting would 
be too gross a word. There was no liberty of mind or 
emotion or personality or speech. 

The men alone present a different aspect. I was, 
for instance, invited to a private and exclusive little 
club of business-men and bankers and lawyers and 
physicians. The club met at a rich man's house. The 
place was furnished with luxury and in tolerably good 

1189] 



UP STREAM 

taste. There was beer and tobacco and an atmosphere 
of virile ease. It looked hopeful. Nearly all the men 
had a local reputation for culture and were graduates 
of Eastern colleges. Yet, as the evening wore on, I 
grew more and more silent and when it was over I 
was glad to get out into the cool, dark street alone. 
For these men talked exclusively of things — the price 
of real estate, of stocks and bonds and sugar. They 
told stories of shady business deals and ;of political 
corruption. Not, be it observed, in a spirit of criticism, 
but with acquiescent good humor. The monstrous 
implication of all their talk — I include both the dis- 
tinguished occulist and the learned judge — was this: 
here we have the best of all polities in the best of all 
possible worlds; for in this polity and in this world 
we make our money and have these houses and auto- 
mobiles and fifty-cent cigars. Anyone, therefore, who 
wants to change this order is a knave or a fool and 
we would go to any length to crush him. Well-fed, 
well-groomed, they sat in their impenetrable stolidity, 
taking liberties with everything except their minds. 
The gentleness which they had at receptions was quite 
gone. There was something agate-like about them. I 
understood at last how it is possible for men to hire 
thugs and incite striking workers to violence and then 
shoot them down. In mellower intervals they talked 
golf and base-ball. . . . They treated me with finished 
courtesy. But their courtesy didn't hide their essential 
attitude: I was to them (by virtue of the interests I 
stood for) a little higher than a fiddler, many degrees 
lower, except socially, than "Babe" Euth. They didn't 
mind an occasional condescension to art and learn- 
ings. But these things are really, they seemed to say, 

[190] 



THE COLOR OF LIFE 

luxuries for women. Nor did their own assertion of 
personal freedom — the excellent beer they drank — en- 
courage one. For they drank only at private houses 
and private clubs. They drank with an evil secretive- 
ness and a poisonous aloofness. Quite conceivably 
they voted "dry." Their clubs are still supplied — 
you may be sure. The decent and the democratic places 
to drink are home — with open windows — and the pub- 
lic-house. But a genuine as opposed to a pseudo-demo- 
cratic bearing might have injured their financial 
standing, their professional dignity. In public they 
all talk liberty. In reality they were stealthier than 
feudal lords. Later, no doubt, they became the sup- 
porters of Navy Clubs and Defense Leagues and of 
the modern Inquisition under Mitchel Palmer. . . . 



Is there no rebellion against the dark unveracity 
that degrades and muffles all the instincts of man? 
Faint flutterings — pathetic in the sense of their own 
feebleness and shame. Has any other people ever 
expressed its Dionysiac mood so spiritlessly as in jazz, 
the new dances, the common cabaret? And yet . . . 
listen well to this raucous, syncopated,, music — not 
music so much as sheer, rude rhythm — like the stamp- 
ing feet and clapping hands of rude, old orgiastic folk- 
dances. Now and then, in the tunes, you come upon a 
vain and melancholy cry — a cry of torment, a cry of 
liberation. Read the words of the popular songs — 
sung in a million parlors every evening by shop-girls, 
typists, laundresses, even college-girls to their 

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"beaux." They are illiterate and vulgar and inde- 
scribably mean. But what imperious instinct cursed 
and beaten into hiding will not show the ugly marks 
of the slave! The choruses of these songs are ugly 
because they t dare not be beautiful, stealthy because 
they dare not be frank. But in dance and song and 
ragtime there is a craving for rhythm — the rhythm of 
the world that is sex and poetry and freedom. It is an 
ugly, hoarse, tortured rhythm — like the dancing of a 
crippled child. . . . The rhythm beats on and on. . . . 
My friend the lawyer told me this story from the 
records of the Central City courts. A fellow killed a 
man and was sent to prison. His young wife sup- 
ported herself and her child and her mother and faith- 
fully waited for her husband. He came out of prison 
and beat her and ran away and was heard of no more. 
So the young 1 woman and her mother took a lodger. He 
fell in love with the woman and they lived together. He 
supported her and her mother and her child. But when 
his own child was born the court arrested the couple, 
sentenced them to the workhouse for adultery and 
placed the children in public institutions. The records 
do not tell us what became of the old mother, nor in 
what state of mind the man and woman came from 
the workhouse. Do you wonder that to the people love 
has come to seem a shameful thing? . . . Men sit at 
cheap burlesque shows with a leer. Why not? Judges 
and clergymen and businessmen tell them that their 
appetites — the source of all they have in life of poetry 
and romance and the freedom of choice and adventure 
— are bestial ; that they are not — the last ingenuity of 
foulness — to be humanized, but to be whipped out of 
sight like mangy curs. Then they expect them to be 

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THE COLOR OF LIFE 

clean and handsome. . . . The man and the woman of 
my story came out, I suppose, with a purer love, a 
cleaner sex-life, a higher self-respect. . . . We shall 
not have lovelier private morals until we have 
destroyed public morality — the fang and claw of 
Puritan capitalism. . . 

There are nobler protests and more conscious ones 
than dances and cabarets. There is the rebellion of 
the intellect and of a few free personalities. Little 
groups of men and women detach themselves from the 
monotonous mass here and there. People jeer at Green- 
wich Village — the shabby Latin Quarter of New York. 
Even liberals are contemptuous. But do you expect 
anything unstained and clear to-day? Even this is 
something. The other day, after a long interval, I 
wrote some verses. And they sum up something of 
this whole matter. I called the verses The Greenwich 
Villagers and represented these people as speaking 
of themselves : 

We're shabby and not always clean. We know. . . . 

You come from Harlem and from Washington Heights 

And look at us as though we were a show, 

And crowd through foolish little inns for sights, 

And, being liberals, are sorry for 

Our fluttering aims and large futility. . . . 

And when the lamps go out we seem to be 

Hovering shadows in a dim corridor 

That leads to places where a man forgets 

Amid the blue fume of the cigarettes 

Man's proper business for which earth was made : 

Marriage and war and trade. 

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UP STREAM 

But just because we do forget, because 

In our small, callow, ineffectual way 

We drift beyond success and all its laws 

And warm our hearts with brief loves as the day 

Dips red in the North River — therefore we 

Are as a flicker of hope above the gray 

Walls of your goodness and brutality. 

We are the children of the land who fled 

In Autumn when the winds of longing blew 

Even from Pittsburgh and from Kalamazoo 

From jobs in which our brothers served and rose, 

From colleges with Doric porticoes 

Where living things are fettered to things dead — 

And we are nothing but the unresigned 

Who in great darkness feebly speak the name 

Of that rebellion which will save mankind 

And from our poor, lost ashes leap to flame. 

And so you may despise us more or less, 

And hug your righteousness and your success, 

And never dream that we poor lads in blue, 

We girls with draggled skirts and close-bobbed hair 

May be the saving of the souls of you, 

Even as we tramp on Greenwich Avenue 

Or loiter in the dusk on Washington Square. 

But these things were far from Central City. Faint 
rumors came. What, in those years, I definitely knew 
and saw was the Federal Post Office stamping out as 
either "seditious" or "obscene" anything it pleased. 
From 1915 on the silence deepened — an ugly ominous 
silence. Such, I dare say, was the silence in the In- 
quisition chambers. Also, men began to break off 
speech in the middle of a sentence and turn a little red 
or pale. And they began to watch each other and fur- 
tively to listen to each other for seditious remarks and 

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THE COLOR OF LIFE 

plan and scheme how they could make business or pro- 
fessional profit out of their neighbor's indiscretion. 
And, anonymous letters and telephone calls kept busy 
the offices of the District Attorney, who, although we 
were to be "kept out of the war," was very accessible 
to information that might come in handy later. . . . 

YI 

Yet then and even now the man on the streets 
thinks that we have liberty. He has no true concep- 
tion of its nature, and his spirit is corrupted by the 
brutal romanticism of success. For he is right in 
thinking that, within ever narrowing limits, he has one 
kind of liberty — the liberty of economic competition. 
He may, if he is clever and unscrupulous enough, steal 
the resources that belong to all men and so enslave a 
number of his fellows and become a plutocrat him- 
self. He reads about Morgan and Eockefeller and 
shakes his head with a leer: "Smart men." And per- 
haps he has a day-dream of himself — now working at 
thirty-five a week and rent going up and the children 
without shoes — and well, who knows ? He may himself 
"put through a little deal" some day and live "on 
easy street!" He wouldn't vote the Socialist ticket 
for hell ! Why, look at So and So ! Started at eight 
a week. Now he's president of the Great Gorge Road. 
Worth five millions if he's worth a cent. The man 
pushes back his greasy derby and spits with a specu- 
lative air. "Smart people in this here world, I tell 
you." His wife reads her Sunday paper and glows 
over accounts of the social doings of the local pluto- 
crats. She drops her paper and dreams the same day- 

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dream from another angle. And the cheap magazines 
that float their way and the picture-shows they see all 
glorify wealth and "getting on" and yet carefully re- 
frain from arousing any social consciousness. For 
generally the old millionaire repents and sinks into a 
pool of domestic emotions and gives his daughter in 
marriage to the poor young man. And our citizen's 
wife nudges her husband and points to the young man 
on the screen who is just about to marry the million- 
aire's daughter and says: "Ain't he the perfect image 
of our Johnny?" 

Our man has the liberty of economic competition. 
Of the slimness of his chance to avail himself of that 
liberty he does not think. He can dream his favorite 
dream. Also he has a vote. He can choose between 
two candidates both offered him by essentially the 
same masters. Also he can worship at either the Bap- 
tist Church or the Methodist or the Campbelite. But 
once let him think and arise from the dull mass and 
cease worshipping the idols of the tribe and the mar- 
ket-place! If he speaks he will be gagged; if he acts 
he will be jailed. Yet it is only for that arisen and 
awakened man that liberty has its true meaning. When 
the personal consciousness emerges from the merely 
tribal consciousness — there is the birth of liberty. 
Hence in a deeper sense the common phrase is true: 
liberty means progress — the liberty of individuals to 
rebel against the mass-life, to repudiate mass-thinking, 
to shatter the folk-ways, to be the instruments of 
change. A society in which majority opinion and pub- 
lic law have not risen to the tolerance of such free per- 
sonalities is a society without liberty and without hope 

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THE COLOR OF LIFE 

from within. It may build machinery and heap up 
wealth. It is as stagnant as a rotting pool. 

One hears people talk fatuously about " evolution" 
not revolution. They are usually of the economic 
master class. What they mean is the preservation of 
the status quo. They hope that they will always be 
able to gather enough votes and control enough can- 
didates and own enough land and tools and ships and 
trains to perpetuate the present order exactly as it is. 
Thus they defeat the hope of orderly change and create 
the revolutionary spirit. For they stigmatize each 
step in the developmental process as revolutionary. 
And since all ultimate change is reached by successive 
changes, since, in a word, the evolutionary process 
consists of a series of revolutions, they, rob them- 
selves, by their own unveracity and muddleheadedness, 
of the easements in the process of change which might 
well be theirs. Hence, though they may delay their 
fall, they refuse foolishly to mitigate its horrors. It 
is, an old story. Men do not learn by experience, as I 
have said. Nor is it easy for them to believe that to 
be true which contradicts their interests and their 
hopes. We all share that weakness — capitalist and 
proletarian, business-man and intellectual. Eui there 
are minds which, having seen their hopes go down to 
incredible disaster once, walk thereafter more warily 
and humbly in the world and see the drift of things 
which will not change for their liking and read coldly, 
without regard to their hearts and desires, the signs 
that flame in the cosmic skies. 



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CHAPTER IX 

Myth and Blood 



In August the grass on the campus looked singed, 
the trees and bushes stale. In the halls the graduate 
students, registered for summer school, raised a clatter 
that was somehow drained of energy. They went 
through all the motions of intense life, but the inner 
principle was lacking. White skirts, filmy bodices, 
filmier stockings. Firm bodies that throbbed. But the 
outer mind, carefully trained in the mimicry of self- 
preservation, pursued points of pedagogical technique 
with a bitter eagerness. A few were old and quiet. 
There was also one small, consumptive-looking China- 
man with a cold, remorseless appetite for knowledge. 
He seemed to gnaw at my brain. The dusty class-rooms 
pulsed with the hot air and the bodies of the young 
women. "When one is young" — I was 'discussing 
Schnitzler in my seminar that summer of 1914 — "life 
is full of windows and beyond every window the world 
begins." That saying seemed a ferocious irony in 
Central City. We moved in a cruel hush behind black 
bars. Our windows were all prison windows. 

There were no signs in the heavens. There never 
are. Only I remember one dry, blazing noon looking 

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MYTH AND BLOOD 

intently at the stripped and wilted lilac bushes and 
saying to myself: "Little Servia." It must have been 
July. In August it would have been: "Little Belgium." 
Those phrases are cheap and ugly and tattered to-day. 
They are like the styles of a decade ago. No one is 
saying: "Little Hayti." They are out of fashion but 
lacking in the dignity of age; they are ugly without 
quaintness, like shoulder-of -mutton sleeves. Some day 
they will flame once more for that small community 
of spirits which remembers and records the vicissitudes 
of mankind. Then it will be written down how huge 
populations devoid of gallantry or mercy, aching them- 
selves through their emissaries to dabble in the blood 
of any at their feet — in Amritsar or Balbriggan, Hayti 
or North Africa, Jewish villages in Poland or black 
belt towns in Georgia — took up the cry of "Hun" and 
poisoned the minds of young people and little children 
on three continents not against the fierce competitions 
that end in hate and blood, but against the soul of the 
German people. It will be written down in the history 
books. But to the man and woman on the street his- 
toric truth is pragmatic. Truth is what prevails. 
That is one reason why I think this Christian-cap- 
italistic civilization will be overturned. At its core 
festers a cancerous lie. It feeds on spiritual tissue. 
The superstructure will decay. ... 

I shall not fight the war over. A mind that does 
not see it to-day as universal guilt or else universal 
blundering and fatality and does not mourn over every 
portion of mankind with an intensity measured purely 
by that portion's acuteness of suffering, is beyond the 
reach of reason and humanity. I find a good many 

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people admitting that now, but often with a shadow 
of mental reservation. Aren't we, their eyes seem to 
plead, a little, oh, just a little better than the Germans 
— just we and the British, 7 That plea, that look, is 
fatal. Only by giving up self -righteousness to the last 
shred, only by an utter and universal brotherhood in 
self-abasement can anything be saved from the wreck- 
age. For those with that look in their eyes and also to 
steady and keep true the drift of this story which is 
not only a story but a symbol I recall and record : 

The German militarists commanded the fighting to 
be done with merciless severity. 

British troops before going into action were habit- 
ually given the following instructions: "The second 
bayonet man kills the wounded. You cannot afford to* 
be encumbered by wounded enemies lying about your 
feet. Don't be squeamish. The army provides you 
with a good pair of boots ; you know how to use them. " 
(Stephen Graham: A Private of the Guards.) 

From 1917 on the German High Command used 
wildly desperate and brutal measures to win the war. 

From the autumn of 1917 on, the hunger blockade, 
which the government of the United States called 
"illegal and indefensible" in 1914, produced rachitis, 
a change and softening of the bony structure among 
the civilian population of Germany. The chief suffer- 
ers were children under five, adolescents between four- 
teen and eighteen and women over forty. The little 
children became crippled and could not walk; the girls 
and boys crumpled up in the streets ; the women died. 

The Germans had lost the ancient tradition of a 
chivalrous respect for one's foes. 

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MYTH AND BLOOD 

It was during their final retreat in 1919. " l I must 
admit that the boche is a tenacious brute.' said a 
young French lieutenant just back from the firing line. 
'This Grand Division has been smashed to pieces, yet 
the remnant fights just as hard. Cornered rats, I sup- 
pose. Anyway, it shows that their discipline is still 
strong, that men will sell their lives thus without 
hope!' " (The New York Times, July 31, 1919.) 

The armies of the allies went forth to defeat a men- 
acing militarism. They believed what they were told. 

The Germans "were men fighting blindly to guard 
an ideal, the Heimat, some patch of mother earth. . . . 
This everything that meant home to them they were 
told was in danger, and this they went out to save." 
(Evelyn, Princess Blucher: An English Wife in Ber- 
lin.) 

Lissauer wrote a Song of Hate, Begnier wrote 
Serment, our population went to a propaganda film: 
The Beast of Berlin. 

Thackeray recalls the wars again Napoleon in his 
lecture on George III. "We prided ourselves on our 
prejudices; we blustered and bragged with absurd 
vainglory; we dealt to our enemy a monstrous injus- 
tice of contempt and scorn; we fought them with all 
weapons, mean as well as heroic. There was no lie 
we would not believe, no charge of crime which our 
furious prejudice would not credit. I thought at one 
time of making a collection of the lies which the French 
had written against us and we had published against 
them during the war : it would be a strange memorial 
of popular falsehood." 

A universal brotherhood of self-abasement! 

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In Central City, invisible pulses began to beat all 
about me in the air. I wrote : All the few hard- won 
virtues of the free personality are going down to dis- 
aster. The individual was merciful; the tribe is cal- 
lous. The individual was reasonable; the tribe is in 
the grip of dark, irrational instincts. Thus public 
passions, however generous their apparent origin, 
degenerate into wild unreason and beastiality. A pub- 
lic passion of religion sees miracles ; a public passion 
of hatred sees atrocities. Both are well attested in all 
countries and in all ages of a religious or a war-like 
mood. Immemorial savage impulses which the indi- 
vidual dare not express are vented under the supposed 
righteousness of a tribal sanction and decent men 
become persecutors, lynchers and murderers. Such, 
from any civilized point of view, is the basic tragedy 
of war. The merging of the individual into the tribe 
wipes out all the difficult gains of the cultural process. 
It hurls us back into the red, primordial mists of hate 
and cruelty and self-righteousness. The imaginative 
vision comes to see and hear in the tense atmosphere 
of still peaceful cities symbolical scenes of a forgotten 
age — the flashing cymbals, the foaming devotees, the 
shrill scream of the human sacrifice in the storm- 
shaken grove. . . . 

The great myth crystalized with a suddenness that 
took one's breath away. A quick, thunderous passion 
for a living sacrifice flared up. I am persuaded that 
any other object would have served equally well. 
Nearly all my colleagues in Central City owed the 
sounder part of their intellectual equipment to Ger- 

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MYTH AND BLOOD 

man sources; many had endearing memories of the 
German land and its people. These potent subjective 
realities were submerged at once. The flood, then, was 
one that had always been pounding in the darkness 
against the dykes of the mind. Historic accident or 
fatality made a breach. The waters swirled. 

They all led — the great, decent, American middle- 
classes, business and professional — rigid and unnatural 
lives. They led and stilLlead unreal lives. In France, 
in Germany, in Italy, the same official codes and forms 
prevail. But there the forms are large-meshed nets; 
here they are eages of concrete and steel. The re- 
spectable American unless he is quite rich cannot take 
a moral holiday. Even when he takes it, his nature is 
so inhibited and corrupted by an unreal morality that 
Ms holiday becomes a debauch. He usually marries 
rather early and marries a woman nearly or quite his 
own age. Three or four children are born. When 
the man is forty, his wife has no freshness left. She 
is a little wrinkled and without emotional resilience. 
It is tragic for the women, more tragic than for the 
men. But they refuse compassion or cure by refusing to 
admit the reality of the tragic facts. They insist on 
what they call equal marriages and as they fade de- 
mand more stonily the rigidness of the home as due to 
their cooperation, their social worth, the sacred service 
of their motherhood. It is very astute of them. They 
deny out of existence the wildness of nature. The 
churches aid them. The men, who are not thinkers, are 
deceived into hideous repressions or ugly debauches 
and either become insensitive or battle with a foolish 
sense of sin. 

It will be thought degraded to attribute the out- 

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burst of so-called patriotic passion that swept this 
country in any degree to the sex-repressions practised 
by our middle-classes. But it was not due to terror 
and revengefulness as in France, nor to terror and 
ambition as in Germany. Nor were there historic 
hatreds or old feuds or national memories involved. 
Many elements unquestionably contributed to it. But 
its peculiarly unmotivated ferocity, its hectic heat had 
in it something unmistakably religious, orgiastic and 
hence obscurely sexual. Upon Germany, the vicarious 
sacrifice, was heaped all secret horror and shame and 
corruption, to her were transferred all hidden sins and 
rebellions and perversities. The nation became a 
lynching party. Its mood expressed itself spontane- 
ously through sex-symbolism. The rape of Belgium! 
In propaganda films and plays, the German villain 
was always represented as seeking the defloration of 
American virgins. Faith, blood, sadism — an old trin- 
ity. If this is ignoble it is because human nature is so. 
Or, rather, because man through a pathetic delusion in- 
sists that what in him is natural is ignoble. The fact 
remains. Neither proletarians nor plutocrats were as 
hectic, were as sick in soul with the war fever as the 
intelligent, moral, thoughtful bourgeoisie. The campus 
in Central City became like an infected place. The 
young students were quite cool and sane. The middle- 
aged professors with homely and withered wives and 
strong moral opinions shouted and flared up and 
wreaked themselves on William II — and Kant and 
Nietzsche and Wagner and even Eucken. When they 
saw me their eyes glowed strangely or turned fiercely 
cold. I would not join the lynching-party. I had a 
weakness for the lynchee. ... I was regarded as 

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MYTH AND BLOOD 

good, loyal Southerners — guardians of Christianity, 
morality, democracy — regard a "nigger-lover." The 
parallel is exact. 

in 

, Yet my weakness for the lynchee was wholly un- 
political in character. It included neither Prussian 
pastors nor Prussian soldiers nor Bavarian priests 
and ultramontanes, even as my sympathies cannot in- 
clude England's Black and Tan constabulary or vulgar 
imperialists or the fierce parsons of our own Pro- 
testant churches. If, as I freely admitted, I did not 
wish to see the empire stricken and abased, it was be- 
cause it happened to be the temporary vessel, how- 
ever imperfect, however riddled with flaws, of a spirit 
of civilization which seemed to me then and seems to 
me now of a sovereign preciousness both in itself and 
also for all mankind. I can illustrate my meaning best 
from the present moment. The year is 1921. The 
reparations committee is sitting in Paris seeking to 
reconcile the extortion of an incalculable indemnity 
from the German people with a permanent crippling 
of that people's industries, shipping, power and 
wealth. The republic that signed the peace of Ver- 
sailles is discredited at home and abroad; the lost 
provinces writhe under a tyranny compared to which 
the stupid Polish policy of the empire was merciful 
and enlightened; the cities and industrial districts of 
what was, seven years ago, the most orderly and the 
healthiest country in recorded history are gaunt with 
hunger and rotten with disease. In Berlin, the pro- 
fiteers celebrate a witches' sabbath of wild and des- 
perate debauchery. The bureaucratic classes who 

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lived with dignity and security under the old order are 
in a state of suicidal reactionary fervor; the workers 
are too hungry and enfeebled to revolt. Fallen from 
a position of boundless power and respect and intel- 
lectual preeminence in the world, this nation is. hum- 
bled as none has been in modern times. She is in the 
dust and every demagogue and fool the world over can 
void his venom on her. Old poets spoke of the terrors 
of the thing they called Mutability and celebrated the 
tragic circumstances of the fall of even the weakest 
and vilest princes. Who, among men, can withhold 
from a proud and gifted people a sombre and remorse- 
ful sympathy? And yet. ... A strange thrill of life 
is running through all those stricken German lands. 
Matthew Arnold called that minority which reflects 
and transcends the passions and lives creatively the 
saving remnant. In Germany the saving remnant has 
always been large and it is large to-day. Fools and 
mere tribesmen crowd the cities and citadels, but each 
of these places can be saved not by one righteous man 
but by a thousand. It seems ironic enough to use the 
word righteous; for righteous in a rigid sense and 
according to standards that antedate experience is 
precisely what these people are not. "What they have 
done is to rend inner veils and to substitute for the 
moral nominalism which is the ultimate source of the 
world's sickness a vision that discerns men and things 
and actions in their real and unique and incomparable 
nature. They have offered defiance to that gigantic 
Beast which Dante saw passing mountains, breaking 
through walls and weapons, polluting the whole world 
; — that uncleanly image of Fraud whose face is the 

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MYTH AND BLOOD 

face of a just man, so mild is its aspect, but whose body 
is the body of a foul serpent. 

La faccia sua era faccia d'uom giusto, 
tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle; 
e d'un serpente tutto l'altro f usto. 

Life is far deeper and more intricate than most 
people permit themselves to know. They make it 
shallow and simple by formulations: a man can love 
but one woman; guilt must be punished; we must be 
unselfish. Out of these formulations and others like 
them they build bridges over the abyss of the soul. 
But the bridges are bridges of ice which only a careful 
chill can preserve. A day comes on which the deeps 
begin to glow and the bridge bursts and there is chaos. 
The Germans of whom I was thinking had gone on 
quests into those deeps. They are going on those quests 
now. They were careless of the character of the polity 
in which they lived before the war ; I am not sure that 
they are building their new one with a very practical 
wisdom. But polities crumble and one form of the 
state succeeds another and so far man has invented 
none that is not irrational and tyrannical at its core. 
The best we can achieve is an inner freedom, moral 
and intellectual liberty, the power of standing above 
the state, face to face with essential things. It is not 
only the poets and the thinkers of Germany who have 
done that, but undistinguished and unrecorded men by 
the million — teachers and traders and waiters and 
workingmen. When they talk they talk about life, not 
about dead formulae, about the feelings and the 
thoughts that are, not about those they would have 

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others entertain. In 1916 a very humble German said 
to me: "Life is curious. I was a socialist in the old 
country and I've got no use for the government. No, 
and I don't believe in conscription. So I didn't think 
I'd have any trouble at all. But when people talk to 
me about the war, they and I talk about different 
things altogether. They talk about militarism and 
Prussianism and they don't mean anything, good or 
bad, that really exists. They mean something they've 
made up out of their own minds. And when I tell them 
facts — mixed facts — because the world isn't a simple 
place, is it? — they're mad at me because I know some- 
thing definite and real and they call me a damned 
Hun. ' ' And another very plain man who came to me 
said: "I'm in trouble with my boss, an American 
gentleman, because I had a love affair with a girl in 
the shop. 'But you're a married man,' he said to me. 
'I know it,' I answered. 'Then what right did you 
have to approach this girl?' 'I don't know,' I said, 
'but I've been married twenty years and my wife is a 
stringy woman with a bitter temper. And this girl 
liked me and it was spring. And I said to myself: 
here's this war and the, world's gone cruel crazy and 
pretty soon we'll all be dead and rotten. There was 
a lilac bush in the garden and it was twilight and so 
I kissed her a few times. And I almost thought I was 
young again and back in the old country and life was 
just beginning and there was peace and a little hope 
and beauty in the world. ' The boss looked at me as if 
I was crazy. 'I'll have no immorality around here,' 
he shouted. 'You're fired!' Now what sort of a man 
is this? He called this immorality and I heard him 
tell some young fellows about the immorality of going 

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MYTH AND BLOOD 

to a street full of bawdy houses. He didn't pay any 
attention to things, you see. He just had a word — • 
immorality — and it made him angry at others and 
satisfied with him self." 

A word — and it made him angry at others and sat- 
isfied with himself. . . . Poor Benecke ! He could get 
no more work in Central City. A Hun and probably, 
like all Huns, immoral to boot. He drifted away. But 
he had given me another definition of the evil malignity 
that lies at the root of moralistic generalizations and 
a fresh sense of what I knew to be the saving and tri- 
umphant virtue of the people to whom he belonged. 

iv 

Thus, too, to-day, poets and thinkers and publicists 
and millions of men and women are striving in Ger- 
many to re-understand and re-create a world in chaos. 
Once more in 1921 as in 1914 Germany leads the world 
in the production of books. There is trash enough — 
morbid rather than empty, as among us. But there 
are philosophies and visions so packed with thought 
and experience that the many thousands of people 
who buy and read them, as the editions show, must be 
admitted to possess a culture and a discipline of the 
mind and a knowledge of their own souls unheard of 
in any other age or land. Likewise the imaginative 
literature — novels and plays and especially the books 
of the new lyrical movement — is drawn from sources 
of perception and reflection which the average cultured 
reader in other countries has not yet reached within 
himself. I do not expect this thing which, for the sake 
of my own mind's integrity, I must assert, to be be- 

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UP STREAM 

lieved. Nothing is so., deep-rooted in us as a sense of 
our ultimate superiority. We may appear to yield on 
this point or that. At the core of the self is a granite- 
hard conviction of tbe betterness of that self and its 
friends and its group. Such is the spiritual malady of 
the race. If once we could stop working with the con- 
cepts " better" and "worse" which we identify with 
higher and lower and so, in a primitive and subcon- 
scious way, with above and below in physical modes 
of being — master, slave, slayer, slain: if we could 
bring ourselves to think in terms of fruitful co-existent 
qualities in the psychical world, we would not struggle 
against such cognitions as I am trying to convey; we 
would have a much larger chance of deriving our self- 
respect from serenity and justice rather than from 
wilful ignorance and rage. 

In Central City I once spoke to a colleague, a pro- 
fessor of political science, of the literature and art 
and thought of the Germans and of the wide dissem- 
ination of these things among the people and made a 
plea for an, at least, inquiring attitude toward such a 
nation. He replied that what I told him was doubtless 
true, but that it did not to his mind constitute a claim 
to high national culture which resided rather in polit- 
ical vigilance and political activity. I did not point 
out to him — he would have regarded it as presumptu- 
ous — the actual political supineness of Americans; 
their extreme suggestibility and their utter careless- 
ness as to the quarters whence their winds of doctrine 
blow. I saw so clearly that he and I were shouting 
across a gulf. Literature and art and philosophy were 
to him not expressions and therefore forms of life, not 
the spiritual organs by which men understand and 

[2101 



MYTH AND BLOOD 

intercommunicate experience jjfchey were to him deco- 
rative additions to life, like tin cornices on a shop 
front. And it would have been useless to tell him that 
the aesthetic and philosophical saturation of great 
masses of the German people had naturally led them 
to esteem political action lightly. For all such action 
implies hard limitation. To choose such action at all 
means a devotion to narrowly denned policies of 
whose insufficiency and mere opportunism the reflec- 
tive mind is at once aware. Thus in every day life the 
unreflective man who is also the energetic one has the 
philosopher at his mercy. To know little is to dare 
easily, to have looked upon all sides of all mortal ques- 
tions is to come near paralysis. Rude men in primi- 
tive communities pass judgment and execute sentences 
in matters that would have left Jesus dumb and So- 
crates puzzled. Then they ride off, these posses and 
lynchers, and eat their dinners in peace. 

Yet the young poets in Germany who are listened 
to by thousands and thousands — Franz Werfel and 
"Walter Hasenclever and many others — are crying out 
for more inwardness, not less, for a spiritualization 
and conquest and absorption into the mind of all things 
and all men; for a suspension of all moral judgment, 
all strife and for the remoulding of the world through 
love. They do not heed the traders and chafferers and 
diplomats — Stinnes no more than Morgan, Simon no 
more than Lloyd George. They are bent upon another 
business and men and women who lack bread and meat 
buy the books of these poets and creators of higher 
realities and go home and read and transcend hunger 
and cold, embargoes and reparations and the loss of 
mines. And they lift their heads from their books, 

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these readers, and hear that Lloyd George reaffirms 
the single and absolute guilt of Germany in the war 
and for a moment they remember a world which is still 
ruled by such hollow and such savage fictions. But it 
is only for a moment. Their bluish lids are lowered. 
They read on. They are rebuilding the broken uni- 
verse in their souls. 



"What could I do with this vision and this knowl- 
edge and this protest of mine in Central City? Men 
talked such arrant nonsense that I committed a hun- 
dred indiscretions, overstated and misstated the inti- 
mate truths that I possessed and even, on the great 
principle of John Stuart Mill that no truth, however 
partial, needs so sorely to be emphasized as that which 
a particular hour in history derides or disregards, 
joined certain friends and colleagues in explaining to 
a technically neutral country the political and military 
actions of the German government. I did not count 
the consequences nor, at bottom, greatly fear them. 
Others were dependent on me and I did not dare to 
fling away the meager sustenance which the university 
doled out to me. But I knew very firmly, though I did 
not always permit that knowledge to reach my con- 
sciousness, that life could not permanently be bounded 
for me by that campus and that town. If by defending 
my mind's integrity, a catastrophe came . . . well, I 
almost awaited it as one awaits rain and thunder on 
a day of unbearable sultriness. 

When America entered the war the president of 
the university sent for me. A tall, thick, old man with 
a hoarse, monotonous voice and a large, determined, 

[212] 






MYTH AND BLOOD 

self-righteous mouth. A mouth like William Jennings 
Bryan's — half business man's, half fanatic's. The 
intellectual equipment of a Presbyterian elder in a 
small town; the economic views of a professional 
strike-breaker tempered by a willingness to be charit- 
able to the subservient poor; the aesthetic and philo- 
sophic vision of the Saturday Evening Post. He talked 
to me like a war editorial in the New York Evening 
Telegram and tried to make that talk persuasive to 
me. He who believed, let us say, in the virgin birth 
of Christ, tried to convince me that the countrymen 
of Dehmel and Hauptmann and Strauss and Einstein 
had mediaeval minds. A perverse imp leapt up in me. 
I translated some observations of Goethe and Shelley 
and John Stuart Mill and Whitman into his vernacular 
and spoke. His eyes grew a little hard and forbidding 
and shifted to the blotter on his desk. But he thought 
me more unpractical idealist — his euphemism for fool 
— than knave and promised, quite sincerely, that he 
would guard my interests unless his hand were forced. 
He made a virtue of this moral opportunism. Per- 
sonally, he assured me, again sincerely, that he was 
willing to be tolerant ; if the herd stampeded he would 
trample with the best. Such was the notion of democ- 
racy held by this essentially good and honest man. 

I expected no more. But my friend, the professor 
of philosophy, failed me. Not personally. They were 
all kind enough. But intellectually. And that was 
worse. He who had always protested against the 
notion that truth could be discovered by committees 
now made the war-psychosis of the crowd his criterion 
of conduct and opinion. "How about the splendor of 
. being in a minority, of resisting the mass, of suffering 

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for an unpopular conviction, V 9 I asked him. He stul- 
tified and denied himself, his intellectual past, his 
moral character. He thundered against the ninety- 
three German intellectuals who had believed what their 
government had told them and himself accepted as 
gospel the reports of the capitalistic and jingo press. 
The German intellectuals are dead or have recanted 
either explicitly in words or implicitly by supporting 
the revolution. My friend has not been heard from. 
He still teaches philosophy. 

The crash came in a curious and, rightly looked 
upon, an amusing way. In 1916 I had published a little 
book on the modern movement in German literature. 
It was an unpolitical little book. It tried to convey a 
spirit, an atmosphere, a mood ... to show that the 
best living writers were liberals, radicals, cultivators 
of a Goethean freedom. I said, among other things, 
that Nietzsche was indisputably one of the great mas- 
ters of prose. The book fell into the hands of a real- 
estate broker. One must savor that fact. One must 
visualize the pudgy gentleman at his golden oak roll- 
top desk in his private office. He has been reading the 
editorial in his paper; he is fired to do his duty as a 
man and an American. There is something wonderful 
in the supreme innocence and directness of his mental 
processes. "What, shall a man be supported by the 
people's money who glorifies that which our sons are 
going out to destroy at the cost of their blood? He 
summons his secretary who pats her sleek hair with 
brilliantly manicured fingers and shifts her chewing- 
gum to the other cheek. He dictates and a glow fills 
his bosom. The letter goes to the president and the 
deans of the university, to the governor of the state, 

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MYTH AND BLOOD 

to the trustees, to senators. The real estate broker — 
like Dwight Deacon in Zona Gale's excellent story — 
goes virtuously home and, at the head of his domestic 
board, impresses an admiring family with his patriotic 
vigor, his acumen, his importance. He looks instruc- 
tively over his glasses, then for a moment glumly: 
"Vera, did I hear you giggle? You may leave the 
table. Upon my word ! Well, as I was saying : these 
disloyalists . . . seditious talk . . . undermine morale 
. . . contaminate the young . . . dooty of every wide 
awake citizen. . . ." It goes on and on, the talk of 
the eternal real estate broker, it goes on in peace as 
well as in war : Be like me, be like me, think and feel 
as I do, or I will drive you out, burn you, hang, draw 
and quarter you and lick my lips at the trickle of your 
blood. . . . And I, in my own small and dusty way, 
was the eternal outcast, rebel, the other-thinking one — 
guilty before the herd, guiltless in the dwelling-places 
of the permanent, breaker of taboos, creator of new 
values, doomed to defeat on this day in this little 
grimy corner of the universe, invincible and inextin- 
guishable as a type. Shall I ever conquer the real 
estate broker? Shall I ever absorb him into myself? 
And if I ever absorb him into myself shall I not be 
he again? That is the question at the core of human 
history. And it is fathomless. 

XT 

The president balked a little at the real estate 
broker. Not for any deep reason. Only he had a dumb 
feeling that the real estate broker was attacking the 
thing from a wrong angle and interfering with his 
own paternalistic and, upon the whole, humane and 

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kindly management of faculty affairs. Yet he was 
gradually being saved the nuisance of a final decision. 
The matter was being taken out of his hands. 

The campus had been turned into a training-camp 
and swarmed with youths in khaki. They studied, 
slept, ate, drilled, talked in mechanically formed 
groups. A slow, stinging horror seized my flesh and 
crept into my bones. They were being trained to kill 
and be killed, to multilate and to be mutilated. They 
were very cheerful. Each, at the innermost point of 
consciousness, carried the invincible, mystical assur- 
ance that he would come out unscathed. Each, like 
all of us, was unable to imagine his own death. For 
the universe is unimaginable to the individual without 
his consciousness of it: his perception of it creates and 
upholds it. Since he believes in its permanence, he 
believes, despite reason and experience, in his own. 
Such is the mystical and fatal delusion which, dis- 
guised under the names of patriotism, courage, sac- 
rifice, makes conscription and modern war possible. 
If we could rip that delusion asunder, unswathe the 
consciousness of common men from these sticky layers, 
the enslaving state would crumble. The sight of those 
cheery, healthy boys turned me sick. I saw them 
blinded, waving bloody stumps, rotten with gangrene 
in trenches under fire. I rebelled against that place of 
irony and horror; I refused to take any precautions. 
A leprous sun seemed to burn over Central City. Mid- 
dle-aged men and women roared and wheezed, and 
sweated with hatred and patriotism and urged these 
young bodies to hasten to hurl themselves into blood 
and ooze and ordure. 

An oily voice, a sleek, voluble voice with a hard 

[216] 



MYTH AXD BLOOD 

contradictory snicker in it came to me over the tele- 
phone. My presence was required on such a day at 
such an hour in the office of the district attorney. The 
voice purred reassuringly and then repeated the order 
with a sudden, lustfully cruel bark. 

It was the owner of that voice who received me — 
white-haired, ruddy, cold-eyed but with a set, wheed- 
ling smile fixed under a thick, heavy, dogged nose. He 
took me into the district attorney's office, a large, 
square, ordinary lawyer's room with shabby desks and 
swivel chairs and rusty calf-skin volumes with red 
labels. Sharp sunshine poured in through the tall win- 
dows; a pigeon sped past; a bough tapped against the 
stonework. The district attorney sat back in his chair, a 
big, dark, bald man, not fat but fleshy; cold, meanly 
sensual, a careless begetter of children, a good "pro- 
vider," a family man, a politician, a "handshaker." 
. . . He shook hands with me. I looked at his enor- 
mous cheeks, his small, official eyes. A huge expanse 
of shirt extended from his long chin to his belt. There 
was something monumental about the man, but also 
something obscene. I felt both the impenetrability 
of him and the raw, voracious appetites. He was, of 
all things, jovial! "Well, professor, I thought we'd 
better have a talk." His pretense that we were good 
fellows together was odious. "What have you against 
me?" I asked. He leaned forward. "A stack of evi- 
dence this high." "Let me see the evidence and con- 
front me with the persons who provided it." "We 
don't do that," he snapped. "Then how can I tell what 
you're talking about?" He sat back comfortably and 
drawled: "Didn't you say that if America entered 
the war. ..." I had, as a matter of fact, said none 

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UP STREAM 

of the things he repeated. In the privacy of my office 
at the university I had made remarks that malice had 
twisted, broadened, coarsened and then communicated 
to him. I at once suspected the stupid woman who had 
probably written him anonymous letters. I pointed 
out to him that the evidence was garbled, not of a 
character that would be admitted in any American 
court of law and that it referred exclusively to the 
period of American neutrality during which, from the 
narrowest and most autocratic point of view, I had 
been free to say what I chose. Instead of replying he 
suddenly sprang up and roared. ' * What have you ever 
done to show your patriotism? "What have you ever 
done for this country'?" "I have taught and written. 
. . . ." He roared me down. "You liked to do that! 
What've you ever done for your country, I ask you!" 
The thing went on for an hour. I tried to reach his 
reason. He didn't want that to happen. At the end 
of the session he shook his head gloomily. He would 
see. . . . 

Upon the whole he evidently thought me small 
game. Several influential members of the faculty 
wrote him in my behalf ; the president sent him a mes- 
sage; he consented to my remaining in the service of 
the state. But I did not remain. The colleagues who 
pleaded for me did so not because they believed in 
freedom, but because they had a personal kindness for 
ine and some respect for my character; the president 
protected me because he knew that I was poor and a 
good teacher and because he did not consider my 
wrongheadedness grave enough to warrant Mary's 
being exposed to material surf ering. The tacit under- 
standing was that I could buy a continued tenure of 

[218] 



MYTH AND BLOOD 

my job by silence, conformity, slavish submission. I 
asked for a sabbatical year that was due me and was 
granted the favor. 

I fared very well and I am not insensitive to kind- 
ness. But what I had hoped for came from no quarter 
— a recognition, however faint, of the tenableness of 
my intellectual position. A German colleague, an ex- 
quisitely lovable, gifted, gentle soul, was fired without 
mercy. He was ill in body and had a frail wife — an 
American woman — and three small children. A poet 
and a philosopher, he wandered about selling books, 
tortured by the dull surfaces of an unfeeling world. 
He finally took a small position in Mexico. There, at 
the age of thirty-five, he died the other day. Hardship 
had undermined his strength; the process begun in 
Central City reached a fatal conclusion. Yet the men 
there knew the beauty of his mind, his complete polit- 
ical harmlessness, the fact that he had not come to us 
an immigrant but had been summoned as an exchange 
teacher to a great American University. But they 
were utterly callous to his fate. They had studied and 
philosophized with him and broken bread with him. 
They cast him out to die. . . . 

Why did they relent to me! Because of the native 
tongue in my head, the things I had written, the fact 
that in all fundamental senses I am an American. A 
blind, half-conscious feeling of solidarity with me 
guided them, neither the idea of justice nor that of 
freedom. Yet this was a university and there they 
taught then and there they teach now Plato and Kant, 
Montaigne and Voltaire, Goethe and Shelley and even 
Walt Whitman who "beat the gong of revolt and 
stopped with them that plot and conspire.' ' 

[219] 



CHAPTER X. 
The Wokld In Chaos 



A quiet corner of old New York seemed a refuge 
from glare and hubbub. Around the corner was a 
tavern where one could drink beer and listen to music. 
The fiddlers were still Hungarians who played Grieg 
and even Brahms and Magyar dances and Russian 
folk-melodies. One could talk to one's friends in 
whatever language the mood and the subject de- 
manded. We sat there even as other like-minded 
groups sat in London and Paris and Munich waiting 
for the madness of mankind to spend itself. The 
lamps of the tavern had orange-colored shades, the 
wainscoating was black with age. The place was filled 
with a soothing dusk and the blended odor of beer and 
tobacco and Wiener Schnitzel. I was, at least, back 
in civilization. There were no sweet slops ; there was 
no gabble consisting largely of "dope," "guy," 
"sport," "case," "jazz," "Hun." It is quite easy to 
jest. But beneath the easy jest is a hard fact. Beer; 
and wine and tobacco are the companions of poetry \ 
and philosophy and love ; soda-water and banana- 
splits and sport not as a diversion but as a business, of 
moral lynching and the worst forms of sex slavery. 

[220] 



THE WORLD IN CHAOS 

. , . That tavern is gone now, swept away by the 
barbarism of the Neo-Puritans. 

For some weeks Mary and I relaxed our minds and 
nerves. But my resources would not permit me to re- 
main quite idle and an old friend brought me the offer 
of a mastership in a private school. To teach English 
and Latin to boys seemed a tolerable enough prospect. 

The huge building arises before me, the immense 
Y. M. C. A. building on the ninth floor of which the 
Harley School was housed. On the very first day of 
my activity a blast from some icy and infernal region 
seemed to smite my nerves. On the third day I knew 
that I had entered the lowest depth of civilization 
where there are elevators and modern plumbing and 
scientific ventilation and hygiene and cleanliness and 
morality and where the soul is dead. There were one 
hundred boys, varying in age from twelve to seventeen. 
They were nearly all the sons of wealthy tradesmen, 
brokers and manufacturers. They brought with them 
from their homes a stony contempt for literature, art 
and learning, for any form of reflection, for all toler- 
ance, gentleness, humanity — for everything except 
money, machines and blind force when that force was 
exerted by them or in the direction of their strictly 
material interests. I did not make these observations 
hastily. I tried to exert a softening and a saving in- 
fluence on one boy after another. So did one other 
member of the teaching staff — a cultivated, spiritual- 
minded, elderly New Englander. He and I compared 
notes day after day, "We were dealing with souls 
killed by machines and by the doctrine of force before 
they had had a chance to be born. They listened to 
neither my old friend nor to me; they were impene- 

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UP STREAM 

trable to the simplest and most picturesque historical 
or literary instruction. But they attended earnestly 
to the malignant moral drivel of the Y. M. C. A. secre- 
taries which consisted of two negative admonitions: 
be ignorant of sex and drink no alcohol, and of one 
positive one: smash! — smash the rival team, school, 
and later the rival business or factory; smash the Hun 
and the Bolshevik abroad; smash the other- thinking 
one — liberal, socialist, foreigner — at home. And — this 
was the constant corollary — in order to smash success- 
fully, "get together," do team-work, never think, feel, 
act, except with and through your particular pack. 
This gospel of mass brutality and individual cowardice 
and dishonor was studded in the chapel talks with the 
names of successful men as exemplars — insurance 
magnates, railroad kings, oil monopolists — and was 
offered — such was the effrontery of these creatures — 
in the name of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The great steel and concrete building is in a shabby, 
swarming neighborhood near a railroad station. There 
are lunch rooms and open-air food-stands at every 
corner. The waiting room of the railroad station is 
always crowded. The pupils of the Harley school, 
many of whom came to school in their motor cars, 
were always talking about the "waps" and " dagos' ' 
and "kikes" who drifted to and fro on those streets 
and squares. They spoke of them and laughed with 
a cold, empty derision, a curiously unmotivated malig- 
nity. How good those common people seemed to me; 
how eloquent was the trouble and contemplation in 
their eyes ! I talked with the street-car men and ditch- 
diggers, barbers and prostitutes. These people's nat- 
ural thoughts were very far from the war. It had 

[222] 



THE WORLD IN CHAOS 

been driven, an alien and meaningless thing, into their 
consciousness. "The kings made it," they said, "the 
rich made it." An unlettered Lithuanian plasterer 
said: "Life is hard in Central Europe. The people 
have not land enough to grow their own food. Either 
the big rulers, East and West, must parcel out the 
world-markets justly or there will be famine and revo- 
lution." He caught sight of a policeman and added 
as by rote : "I'm for the allies. Too much militarism 
in Germany." 

There was a school supper and I met the fathers 
of my pupils. They were mellower, of course, and 
their manners and speech were suaver. But they made 
the psychical picture complete. Their contempt for 
any form of thinking was indescribable. In their 
minds the universe was like the blue-print of a 
machine. Every detail was fixed and provided for and 
established by some sanction which they could not ex- 
plain but would not endure to have questioned. I 
deliberately conversed in terms that differed slightly, 
but only slightly, from the verbal formulae of the con- 
ventional newspaper and the Y. M. C. A. secretaries 
concerning the world situation. Fourteen hours later 
a rumor had reached the head-master that there was 
an unsafe man in his school. 

A good many intellectuals, deceived by historical 
analogies, by the public gifts of a few super-pluto- 
crats, by a fitful patronage of the arts exercised by 
wealthy Jews, assign to the financial and industrial 
bosses the qualities and functions of an oligarchy. But 
the oligarchs are rich without splendor and powerful 
without imagination. They are not Medici ; they are not 
even Junkers. They are only grocers. These men of 

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large affairs have pigmy intelligences, the moral preju- 
dices of villagers, the tastes not even of the tap-room, 
but of the "parlor."- They influence legislation and 
own the press and we have prohibition, censorships, 
vice crusades. They are not aristocrats on the lowest 
plane. They are not even amusing like the Prince 
Regent and his strutting " bucks," not even pictur- 
esque and cynical like the French gentlemen of the 
ancien regime; they are stupid, uninteresting, meanly 
barbarous. 

n 

The posters on the walls and fences bothered me. 
Do you remember them? "The Prussian Cur," "The 
Hun, His mark." These posters with their splashes 
of crude red and their pictures of ape or wolf-like 
creatures bore no relation, of course, either to the 
people against whom they were directed nor to the 
minds of the combatants on either side. They revealed 
a brutality and obscenity in the spirits that conceived 
and the hands that executed them which kindled in 
me a little flame of terror at the civilization which, 
unconsciously but firmly, I had always held to be fun- 
damentally humane and secure. Nothing seemed im- 
possible any longer. The barbarities of history, the 
sacking of cities, the useless slaughter of men, the sell- 
ing of people into slavery, the butchery for matters 
of opinion and conscience 1 — all these had been but as 
pictures of perished things to heighten by a melan- 
choly yet not unpleasing contrast the glow of one's 
own hearth, the serenity of one's mind. All that faith 
in the sure, essential decency of life was broken. No 
wonder that the courts passed inhuman sentences, that 

[224] 



THE WORLD IN CHAOS 

men were mobbed and lynched and tortured in prisons 
and that the newspapers grew daily more lecherous 
in their appetite for blood. . . . 

The songs in the music-halls bothered me. 

"America, she needs you like a mother. 
Will you throw your mother down? . . . 

"Like Washington crossed the Delaware 
Pershing will cross the Rhine." 

The crafty blending here of natural pieties with pack- 
ferocity and pack-pride was hit upon by an old 
and deadly instinct. Love was played upon and lurk- 
ing fear. To stamp out from the beginning any stir- 
ring of humane compunction, the public enemy was 
carefully stripped of any of the characteristics that 
distinguish man. Another very old and very effective 
trick. "You are not dealing, countrymen," Cicero 
said in his fourth invective against Antony, "you are 
not contending with an enemy with whom any sort of 
peace is possible. For he does not merely, as he once 
did, desire your slavery, but in his madness lusts for 
your very blood. His favorite game is one of blood, of 
slaughter, of murdering citizens openly. You are not 
dealing, fellow citizens, with a criminal and wicked 
man, but with a monstrous and loathesome beast. . . . 
cum immane tsetraqne belua. ..." (I tried to point 
out the analogy to my pupils. They nudged each other. 
They were sure I was quite mad.) 

I used to watch the great audiences in the music- 
halls. There were no mobile faces, no speaking faces, 
nor many such as showed the scars of passionate ex- 
citement or searching experience. Neither were there 

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UP STREAM 

spiritualized and contemplative faces. The passions 
behind these eyes were not spent, nor were they sub- 
dued ; they were neither exercised nor controlled. They 
were hounds not held in leash by their owners, but 
leashless hounds that cringed and fawned before the 
visible lash and rod o? this society and morality with 
its peculiar law and order. Native or foreign born, 
Jew or Gentile — these faces were the faces of modern 
Christians : natural, pagan men living under the legal- 
ized tyranny of the sickly asceticism of Paul. Fear 
aping solemn resignation, or flabby, elderly content 
was in their eyes and on the countenances of the young 
a furtive gaiety, a harsh, empty delight conscious of 
its own brevity and unimportance in a world given 
over to morality and business. . . . No inner pride, no 
natural erectness sustained these souls. So, in their 
drained and inhibited lives, they fasten their pride to 
mean things — skill at a foolish game, a garment, a bit 
'of cooking, a personal oddity, a tawdry virtue lacked 
by a neighbor. But these things do not suffice. There 
is always to be observed a background of querulous 
irritation. Hence, by a pitiful device, men transfer 
their pride to forces outside of themselves — a fraternal 
order, their bosses, the state. When the poor muddle- 
headed, enslaved clerk says: "My concern did a three 
million dollar business last year," or "America can 
lick creation," he substitutes an alien and essentially 
hostile force for his own soul which that very force 
has robbed of the power of being self-sustaining, happy 
and free. Therefore when, during the last year of the 
war, I heard these audiences bay and cheer the foul 
attacks upon an enemy who was not theirs, since there 
is no such thing as enemy except in an evil and con- 

[226] 



THE WORLD IN CHAOS 

structive and lying sense, and when I saw them trans- 
fer their self-respect to their slave-driver, the moral 
and political state, I had an old, old vision — the 
huge, monstrous idol, the sacrificial fires, the victims 
driven by a lust for self-immolation into the scorching 
flames. Yes, those dim, far-off ancestors of mine had 
laid hold upon a profound truth : idols are purely evil. 
Alas, they themselves set up the most menacing of 
idols — a theocratic state. And that state persists. For 
the modern state, whenever it is most hotly bent upon 
oppression within and slaughter without, declares that 
good and therefore God are on its side, that it, indeed, 
embodies the purposes of God, and so the state be- 
comes theocratic by its own fiat and an idol and men, 
who are worshipping animals, writhe in their blood 
and shame and spiritual nakedness at the idol's feet. 
A black year. The war-fever throbbed. The boys 
at the Harley school turned to me each day their bur- 
nished and impenetrable faces. My father died. A 
subtly but relentlessly hostile environment and an un- 
worthy occupation had long ago broken him. His mind 
had slipped into a twilight region of settled despair. 
In one of his last moments of lucidity he had spoken 
sorrowfully of the war and hummed an air of Mozart 
and then wept gently. Thereafter he sank into an un- 
relieved melancholy. When he came to die there was 
nothing more to be hoped for him and so I felt no pang 
for his death, only for his life and into my mind there 
'streamed once more the strange and to me so strangely 
freighted sunshine of Queenshaven. I sat beside his 
body, pondering upon his fate, resolved to speak for 
him a word that he himself had had no power to utter. 

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All things hurt him. He struck out 
To help him in the unequal bout; 
Knowing he was doomed to lose 
He hid with laughter cut and bruise 
And jeered in desperate wildness since 
He dared not let men see him wince. 
In his worst stridency he knew 
That some said "vulgar," some said "Jew," 
And held in frantic leash a whole 
World's sorrow in his stricken soul. 

Yet he was patient, brave and kind 
While stood the stronghold of his mind, 
And coming from the shop or street 
Where he had chaffered in the heat, 
He built a world beyond the dim 
Visions of them who wounded him. 
Secure from them he ceased to scoff, 
Stripped the ignoble gesture off, 
Frugal in every common want 
He played Beethoven and read Kant. 

Now on his forehead blends with love 
The dignity life robbed him of, 
And on his dead and shrunken face 
Falls the grandeur of his race. 

m 

Armistice day came with its sharp though barren 
relief at the ending of the mere butchery. The Ger- 
mans had laid down their arms. Wilson's fourteen 
points were to reshape the world. Then came the 
Judas trick of Versailles, the tricking not only of Ger- 
many but, as is already abundantly clear, of all man- 
kind. "If yon would know what a war was about,' ' 
H. A. Brailsford memorably said, " study the terms of 

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peace." The great capitalistic groups who control in- 
dustrial populations had come to blows over coal and 
Oil and tropical estates and trade-routes. The Western 
group won and proceeded to ruin its chief competitor. 
If millions of innocent people, including their own, if 
all the true goods of civilization, if sanity and honor 
went down to disaster in the process — what did it mat- 
ter to them? They are still busy reducing Europe to 
chaos and they are still talking in terms of guilt and 
moral idealism. If they were honestly brutal the ruin 
might be mitigated. There is something respectable 
and wholesome about a Fisher or a Tirpitz. The lion 
can be caged or shot and still considered a not ignoble 
brute. Let him begin to rip out the bowels of men and 
crunch the bones of little children in the name of this 
man's good and that man's moral castigation, and he 
becomes immeasurably more formidable as well as pro- 
foundly loathsome. 

The cynical observer, were one not too depressed 
to be cynical, could enjoy, as never before, the spectacle 
of the confused antics of mankind. Auckland Geddes, 
the British ambassador, blurts out a partial but very 
important truth: "Germany was being forced into a 
position with rising food costs — look at the change in 
the price of wheat in the first ten years of this century 
— Germany was being forced into a position in which 
she almost had to fight." But Makino, the Japanese 
ambassador, ignorant, if one will believe it, of the 
" pacification" of Korea and the theft of huge Asian 
territories, declares: " Absolute and sincere re- 
pentance — published repentance — without reserve and 
without any attempt to save Germany's face is the 
cornerstone upon which must rest any restoration of 

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confidence. ' ' Repentance for what — the rising price of 
food? Or the growth of population? No, the sturdy 
democratic citizen answers, for William II! That 
is the cynic's triumphant moment. For he does indeed 
see an element of guilt in a great modern people's per- 
mitting itself to be swayed by an orthodox Christian, 
an amateur moralist, a romantic jingo, a mystical na- 
tionalist. But the average conservative American- 
pillar of a church, supporter of the anti-saloon league, 
member of defense committees and fraternal orders, 
proclaimer of America's moral mission — what right 
has he to protest against William II? He is William 
II. He glories in the rule of weak-minded assent to 
dogma, rancid romanticism, far-flung navies, glittering 
armaments. He lets the Congress spend the greater 
part of the nation's income on what is called national 
defense and means international provocation. The 
religion of his fathers and loyalty to his country, right 
or wrong, are good enough for him. So, precisely, were 
they for William II. It is quite true that stupidity 
rules. It rules the world. 

IV 

I was enabled to leave the Harley school and take 
up an occupation for which I am reasonably well fitted 
and which I found more satisfying to the mind than 
any in which I had yet engaged. Quieter moods came 
to me, though often still for months I saw in night- 
mare or in sudden, waking vision those spick and span 
classrooms, those keen, metallic faces and heard the 
cackle and clatter of those insufferably alien voices. 
I found, too, that the long noise and agitation of the 

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war had paralysed the power of seeing, of absorption, 
that it had estranged me from beautiful and enduring 
things. 

An autumn came which was like a return home. 
Once more I saw shadows on the river and bronze 
foliage and laid my palms against the cool trunks of 
trees. Once more with less of inner fever to disturb 
my sight I was able to survey the American scene. 

The end of the war left us, as it left other parts of 
the world, in an uproar of reaction and nationalism — 
the two delusions that repression destroys and that 
uniformity is admirable. The fact that history flatly 
contradicts the first of these assumptions and the 
whole course of nature the latter seems to trouble no 
one. We have something very like witch-hunts upon 
any one, especially in the public service, who is sus- 
pected of having seriously reflected upon political or 
economic questions ; we have a nation-wide, organized 
effort to break down the slow gains of labor ; we have 
a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, outbreaks of smoulder- 
ing race animosities and the apparently inevitable 
recrudescense of Jew baiting. The nation demands, 
as the cant of the day has it, one hundred per cent 
Americanism. 

It is time for some one to speak a little boldly and 
a little rudely concerning these childish fallacies. 
Wherever two or three Americans of German descent 
gather they talk about their loyalty to the constitution 
and humbly submit that they ask nothing but the mini- 
mum rights guaranteed to obedient citizens of the 
sovereign and omnipotent state ; wherever two or three 
Americans of Jewish descent gather they explain to 
each other, for the benefit of the public (including 

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\^y Henry Ford) that only one — or is it two? — of the 
chief commissars of the Federated Socialist Soviet Re- 
public is Jewish and that so and so many Jewish boys 
fought to make the world safe for one group of pre- 
datory imperialisms at the expense of another group. 
The Irish alone, by virtue of something proud and 
fiery and reckless in their nature, seem reasonably free 
from this foolish and futile form of spiritual subserv- 
ience. 

The good man who is also the good citizen is the 
man of self -governed mind and self-originating vision. 
"I think a man's first duty," said Mark Twain, "is to 
his honor, not to his country and not to his party." 
And by honor he meant the honor of the mind. Estab- 
lish your convictions on as sound a basis as you can ; 
then cling to them. That is the only loyalty that has 
any value. The mob that demands conformity of you 
has no claim on your obedience. "It is made up of 
sheep;" to quote Mark Twain once more, "it is gov- 
erned by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It 
suppresses its feelings and beliefs and follows the 
handful that makes the most noise." To yield to 
public clamor is, therefore, not only to betray yourself 
but to give up the duty — your single duty — of creative 
activity within the social group in which you live. Un- 
scrupulous journalists, dependent on narrow capital- 
istic interests, may whip up public passion against 
you. As for the public itself? "The idea of what the 
public will think, ' ' Hazlitt wrote with that triumphant 
sagacity of his, "prevents the public from ever think- 
ing at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private 
judgment, so that in short the public ear is at the mercy 
of the first impudent pretender who chooses to fill it 

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with noisy assertions, or false surmises or secret whis- 
pers. What is said by one is heard by all; the sup- 
position that a thing is known to all the world makes 
all the world believe it, and the hollow repetition of 
a vague report drowns the still, small voice of reason. ' ' 
Thus comes about the intimidation through the mob 
which has no kinship with any service of the people. 
It must always be remembered that ''self-government" 
is not, alas, as John Stuart Mill justly pointed out, 
"the government of each by himself, but of each by all 
the rest. The people consequently may desire to op- 
press a part of their number ; and precautions are as 
much needed against this as against any other abuse 
of power.'' On the subject of liberty there can be no 
compromise. You compromise liberty and betray the 
Republic when you practise unwilling conformity or 
offer a propitiatory obedience to foreheads of brass 
and lungs oif leather. For liberty, in the great words 
of Lord Acton, "means the assurance that every man 
shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his 
duty against the influence of authority or majorities, 
opinion or custom.' ' 

The practice of such liberty does not, as you will 
be told, dimmish a nation's power, only its truculence 
and pugnacity. Nor should it be suspended but all the 
more scrupulously exercised in times of war or the 
danger of war when passion drowns all remnants of 
reflection, terror begets hatred and hatred slavery and 
destruction. The cry of defense is a trick. No numer- 
ous and powerful people, at any rate, wages an un- 
avoidable and purely defensive war. Nor is victory a 
necessity or even necessarily a blessing. It is already 
apparent that the best and truest friends of the French 

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Republic were the " defeatists" of 1916 and 1917. 
There is no certain good but truth, no certain effective- 
ness but in an abstention from all force, no final con- 
solation save the integrity of one's own mind. 



The question of the nature of loyalty and liberty is, 
once closely thought upon, plain enough. More intri- 
cate, at least in appearance, is the problem of nativism 
and the enforcement of cultural solidarity on the as- 
sumption that this country harbors hosts and guests. 
The assumption, being built upon an absurd analogy, 
is baseless. The earth belongs to mankind and all 
early history is the history of migrations. No people 
in the world is dwelling in the land of its origin. 
The Greeks came from we know not where and oc- 
cupied the penninsula and the islands that are their 
historic home ; tribes from the North West of Germany 
sailed to Britain and made it England. The discovery 
of America caused a late and perhaps last migratory 
movement in which, so long as land and air are here 
and over-population or war or persecution elsewhere, 
all mankind has the biological and moral right to par- 
ticipate. Priority of settlement gives no right to the 
exercise of exclusion. Moreover the life of nations is, 
humanly speaking, of enormous duration. In the per- 
spective of historic time the intervals that separate 
the coming of the early English and Dutch from that 
of the early German or even Jewish settlers will shrink 
to absurdly inconsiderable proportions. Whoever is 
here, whoever comes here, has a right to be here and, 

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since he submits to laws, a right to his share in destroy- 
ing or in making them. 

That a nation possessing a compact and autono- 
mous culture should desire recent additions to its pop- 
ulation to merge into its cultural life and enrich that 
life is natural. But the process must come from 
within. So soon as outer urgency is applied the inner 
necessity and, therefore, the spiritual justification of 
the process itself stands in grave doubt. No Anglic- 
ization committees produced Dante Gabriel Rossetti or 
Joseph Conrad, no Germanization committees pro- 
duced Adelbert von Chamisso or Hugo von Hofmanns- 
thal, no movement for the assimilation of foreigners 
made French poets of Francis Viele-Griffin or Stuart 
Merrill. Beautiful things are beloved because they are 
beautiful, because there is in them an irresistible at- 
tractiveness, because they are conformable to the needs 
of the soul. The very existence of an Americanization 
movement shows — when every allowance for our 
peculiar conditions has been made — a discord, a pre- 
matureness ; it shows a crudeness in the fruits of our 
civilization which not force and clamor but only time 
and the sun can ripen. 

Americanization means, of course, assimilation. But 
that is an empty concept, a mere cry of rage or 
tyranny, until the question is answered which would 
never be asked were the answer ripe : Assimilation to 
what! To what homogeneous culture, to what folk- 
ways of festival and song, to what common instincts 
concerning love and beauty, to what imaginative pas- 
sions, to what roads of thought? "We have none such 
that can unite us. Two things are nation wide and en- 
gage the passions of the Anglo-American stock : base- 

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ball and the prohibition of wine, love, speculation and 
art. Is the sharing of these two passions to mark the 
assimilated American? I shall be accused of a per- 
verse injustice. Quite wrongly. For the notion of 
liberty on which the Republic was founded, the spirit 
of America that animated Emerson and Whitman, is 
vividly alive to-day only in the unassimilated for- 
eigner, in that pathetic pilgrim to a forgotten shrine. 
The prohibitionists of Kansas, the lynchers of Georgia, 
the hard-headed businessmen in the chambers of com- 
merce in a thousand cities, the members of the National 
Security League, The American Legion, The Loyal 
American League — what have these self-appointed in- 
quisitors and Black Hundreds to do with liberty? 
" Every man and woman who will not get in line must 
get out!" Such is the avowed program of the Loyal 
American Legion. Such has been the program of every 
instigator of massacre or pogrom in history. These 
people suspect liberty, just as they suspect civilized 
food and drink, art, personal relations, as symptoms 
of an alien and subversive spirit. 

One cultural tradition we have in America and it is, 
by at least a few years, the oldest : the linguistic and 
literary tradition of the English race. But that tradi- 
tion — the tradition of Chaucer and Shakespeare and 

Milton is a learned and aristocratic one. It has 

never humanized the folk of the British motherland. 
How many Anglo-Americans share it? Ask the mem- 
bers of the local chapter of the American Legion when, 
in the name of American culture, they annoy a German 
Singing Society— ask them to quote fifty lines from 
the fundamental classics of the English tongue ! How 
many immigrants, then, can share that tradition or 

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become assimilated to it? One, perhaps one, in every 
million. I am that one in a million. What Anglo- 
American has lived with the poets who are the sources 
of his great tradition more closely] than I? What 
AngloAmerican has a deeper sense for the order and 
eloquence and beauty of his own tongue than I? But 
when, in old days, I desired to translate my American- 
ism in that high and fine sense into action, I was told 
that I was not wanted. Yet I was to be Americanized. 
I am even now to be assimilated. Suppose I intend 
rather to assimilate America, to mitigate Puritan bar- 
barism by the influence of my spirit and the example of 
my life ? Then a writer named, let us say, Stuart Sher- 
man, declares that I pervert the national genius. But 
suppose I am the national genius — Dreiser and 
Mencken and Francis Hackett and I — rather than 
Stuart Sherman or the late Hamilton Wright Mabie or 
the smoothly assimilated Edward Bok? Ah, if we 
could but all meet in the year two-thousand before 
some great and spiritual tribunal. Until some such 
day comes the question must remain an open one. . . . 

The common folk cannot make my original choice 
nor suffer my exclusion. An old and perhaps weari- 
some story is to be told of them, but a story that must 
be told again and again until a sense of true liberty and 
of human values breaks in upon the darkness and the 
degradation of our day. 

I knew an old Jew from the South of Russia. He 
wore a long beard and you could see where his ear- 
locks had been. He had a habit of hiding his hands in 
his sleeves. He read the Torah and the legends of his 
people in the sacred tongue. He read Hamlet and 
Faust in Yiddish translations. He read not only the 

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political news but also the well-conducted literary 
columns in the Yiddish papers and cast a thoughtful 
vote. He sat in his cafe on Second Avenue and dis- 
cussed many notable matters and drank tea and, oc- 
casionally, a thimble-full of brandy and smoked Rus- 
sian cigarettes. He was a wise man and a charitable 
one and died poor. His son has become Americanized. 
He knows neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. His English 
is less foreign than his father's was, but far more 
vulgar and corrupt. On his clean-shaven face there 
is an indescribable blending of impudence and cun- 
ning, servility and smartness. He is manager of the 
Lake City Emporium, makes big money and thinks 
the old man was a little weak in the head. He says, 
having just made another particularly unscrupulous 
f ive- thousand : "Yes sir, I'm an American all right. 
This country is good enough for me. ' ' He likes to see 
a game of baseball and sometimes drowses over the 
Saturday Evening Post. His fat, sleek, indolent, 
young wife blazes with diamonds. . . . 

I knew an old German grocer from Mecklenburg. 
He loved the poems of Claus Groth, the Low German 
Burns, and quoted largely and with a fine, ripe appre- 
ciation from the books of Fritz Reuter. He read Low 
German papers. He was a member of a singing so- 
ciety and was unlearned neither in the great folk-songs 
of his people nor in the works of Schubert and Schu- 
mann. He quenched his moderate thirst with beer. 
His English was broken to the last. But in the Ameri- 
can community which was his home for forty years 
his name stood for careful honor and frugal wisdom. 
His son has become Americanized. He reads the col- 
ored Sunday supplements of the yellow press. He is 

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a baseball "fan;" his favorite songwriter is Irving 
Berlin; he drinks whiskey — on the sly. He wants a 
political job in order "to live on easy street." Mean- 
while he clerks around. Having exchanged his father's 
game of skat for poker he ran through his inheritance 
in two years in gambling rooms. He has Anglicized 
his name. . . . 

These are unhappily not extreme cases. They are 
not rare. They are increasing in frequency under the 
pressure of tribal tyranny. Nor have they, as I shall 
be glibly and vaguely told, anything to do with char- 
acter. For the basic truth of the matter lies here : If 
you drain a man of spiritual and intellectual content, 
if you cut him off from the cultural continuity that is 
native to him and then fling him into a world where his 
choice lies between an impossible religiosity and Pro- 
hibition on the one hand, and the naked vulgarity of 
the streets and of the baseball diamond on the other, 
you have robbed him of the foundation on which char- 
acter can be built. The slow gains of the ages are 
obliterated in him. He uses the mechanics of civiliza- 
tion to become a sharper or a wastrel. 

Mr. Granville Barker, the British playwright, tells 
a story which he will forgive me for borrowing. He 
was taking a walk in spring on Staten Island. It was 
Sunday. Behind a hedge sat an Italian laborer with all 
the grime of the week on him, munching dark bread 
and garlic and reading with great intensity. Mr. 
Barker caught a glimpse of the book. It was a cheap, 
well thumbed edition of the Divine 'Comedy. "The 
children of this man," said Mr. Barker, "will probably 
be Americanized. They will be cleaner and have bet- 
ter wages and eat daintier food and perhaps have 

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electric light in their houses. But will they sit behind 
a hedge on Sunday reading an American Divine 
Comedy of the future?" 

The doctrine of assimilation, if driven home by 
public pressure and official mandate, will create a race 
of unconscious spiritual helots. We shall become ut- 
terly barbarous and desolate. The friend of the Re- 
public, the lover of those values which alone make life 
endurable, must bid the German and the Jew, the Latin 
and the Slav preserve his cultural tradition and be- 
ware of the encroachments of Neo-Puritan barbarism 
— beware of becoming merely another dweller on an 
endless Main Street; he must plead with him to re<- 
main spiritually himself until he melts naturally and 
gradually into a richer life, a broader liberty, a more 
radiant artistic and intellectual culture than his own. 

VI 

I gravely fear that he will not be permitted to heed 
the warning. Those who have the whip will not lay it 
aside. For the evils that are done and suffered in 
human society flow from one source and that source is 
hardest to reach. Probe to the core of any man's con- 
sciousness and you will come upon a blind and stony 
kernel of moral certitude. He has taken his accidental 
tastes, beliefs, instincts, and has transformed them into 
an absolute. Church, synagogue and mosque tell him 
that this complex of instincts and opinions forged into 
solidity by his will to conquer is the command of God. 
The so-called liberal who rejects a revelation still har- 
bors the unbreakable conviction that his moral faith is 
supported by a super-personal sanction and wreaks 

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THE WORLD IN CHAOS 

his set of habits upon his fellows in the name of some 
concept to which he assigns a false universality. Thus 
the religious man, the righteous man, the patriot, each 
is convinced that he knows what is absolutely right and 
hence is justified in enforcing his Tightness and its 
practices upon those whom he considers weak, wrong- 
headed and perverse. From the entertaining of such 
moral absolutes to the lynching stake and the torture 
chamber the path, both logical and practical, is straight 
and unreturning. The man who believes that his moral 
Tightness is absolute, though he himself never touches 
the hair of another's head, is a murderer and the ac- 
complice of murderers. For only from moral certitude 
can arise the exertion of force over others. To avert 
your face from a neighbor who believes that society 
needs a different distribution of property or that love 
is a personal and not a legal matter is to lay hands of 
violence upon his soul. To wage war for an island or 
a coal-field is evil enough. But to wage it with an as- 
surance of one's moral rightness and the enemy's 
moral wrongness reduces men, as we of this genera- 
tion have witnessed, below the fiercest and dullest 
beasts. To fight for the right is the last of human 
follies and degradations. It is to identify yourself 
with God in order to be cruel without the temptation 
of a humane relenting. By the delusion of absolute 
moral knowledge and by no other means can the pa- 
tient and kindly children of the earth be turned into 
brutes with nerves of wire and hearts of granite. When 
the great revolution broke out in Russia I felt a glow 
and a brief hope. But that glow and that hope are also 
fading. For the purpose of an economic revolution is 
to release man from physical suffering and uncertainty 

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and the resultant slavery in order that the individual 
may be set wholly free ; it is not to cage and herd him 
into another exclusive ideology with its dogmas, laws 
and prophets. The aim of ultimate revolution must be 
to destroy the herd and the herd mind and the herd 
mind's hardening into that moral faith from which are 
born persecution and disease and war. 

So at the end of this journey of the mind I reach 
the goal of ancient but eternal platitudes. No change 
will avail in this world except an inner change. There 
is no absolute but life, but the persistence of the in- 
dividual and so of the race. No God has spoken, no 
sanction exists. There is no inherent reason why men 
should own property privately or in common, why they 
should practice monogamy or some other form of 
sexual union. Their aim being happiness and their 
happiness consisting in beautiful and rational living, 
it must be their purpose to discover what actions and 
agreements will lead to such living. The conservative 
replies that these actions and agreements have been 
discovered. The free man's terrible and sufficient an- 
swer must be a picture of the world at the end of 
twenty centuries of capitalism and Christian morals. 
It is a strange fallacy to regard unanimity as desirable. 
Were men unanimous they would be animals with the 
monotonous instincts of animals and the forever 
changeless and recurrent gestures of those instincts. 
Varieties of spiritual temper and outer experience 
make life human. Each variety has relative truth, 
relative value, relative beauty for him who is 
impelled to live it. So soon as he seeks to im- 
pose its dictates upon another, he asserts its absolute- 
ness and not only commits a crime but destroys the 

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multiplicity that makes the cosmos and invites the fea- 
tureless monotony that is the negation of it. He may 
persuade others by being or pleading, never by act- 
ing. To deflect is to wound and even to touch is to kill. 
And life, life only, not one kind of life rather than an- 
other, is sacred. This sacredness must be felt by the 
soul. We must learn to shrink from any exertion of 
force as we do normally from murder. "We must give 
up emotionally the moral legends- that justify our 
tyrannies. The words of Shelley must be accepted 
literally. Man is to be ' ' free, uncircumscribed, " he is 
to be 

Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king 
Over himself; 

he is to liberate himself from " guilt and pain" 

Which were for his will made or suffered them. 

Severely practical consequences arise from such a 
conception of human existence. During the fiscal year 
of 1920 ninety-two per cent of the national expendi- 
ture of this country went for the army, the navy and 
the results of war. The present fiscal year promises 
to repeat the story. Thus over four billions of dollars 
will be spent on the consequences and preparations of 
destruction. These are figures to make the imagina- 
tion halt. But analyze them and conceive of this vast 
wealth spent annually, even within the present eco- 
nomic order, on unemployment and old age insurance, 
education and the endowment of motherhood. At once 
the picture of life undergoes a radical change. There 
are minor but still considerable sources of waste. Mil- 

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lions are spent on missionary work — the feeble im- 
pudence of teaching other races a set of legends and a' 
bankrupt system of conduct; other millions are spent 
on vice crusades, on the persecution of prostitutes and 
on the enforcement of unpopular, repressive laws. The 
children of New York city have not school houses 
enough for the most elementary instruction and the 
courts are asking the inhabitants of the city to raise 
twenty-seven millions of dollars to defray the cost of 
prosecuting infringements of the eighteenth amend- 
ment. It may be doubted whether deliberate human 
folly has gone beyond that in any age or among any 
people apparently civilized. Let us suppose the funds 
of the missionaries and the vice crusaders spent for the 
•medical research of venereal diseases. In one genera- 
tion the physiology and psychology of human love 
would be revolutionized and saved. This, together 
with the elimination of the savage notion /of illegiti- 
macy, the endowment of voluntary motherhood, the 
universal introduction of efficient contraceptives, 
would transform millions of lives that are now stag- 
nant and foul morasses into free rivers flowing in the 
sun. "Why do we waste the wealth produced by human 
labor on crippling our own instincts and hounding our 
own souls ? Why do we, pitiful slaves, toil to make the 
knout that flays our living flesh! Because we let stupid 
zealots persuade us that their sadism is a moral abso- 
lute compulsive on our minds and actions. And be- 
cause men are starved in all their vital impulses and 
robbed of all delight and liberty they sigh for im- 
mortality as the forlornest of mortal hopes, for a 
Mohamedan heaven of sensuous compensation, which 
is the more honest one, or a Christian heaven in which 

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all that is human will be extinguished and trouble them 
no more. The philosopher, driven by a noble urge, 
seeks to make rational his universe by assigning to 
creative values a permanent validity. I share that 
speculative hope. But I deplore its exploitation by 
moralistic professors who play into the hands of them 
that stunt and defile the life of man. ... I see old men 
with vague, wandering eyes and thin, drawn lips and 
claw-like fumbling hands. They mutter in the 
churches; they confer with priests; they make gifts 
to buy their way to heaven past old thefts and stealthy 
lecheries. Morality has disinherited and poisoned 
them. They want another chance; they want to be 
cleansed. ... I have a vision of an old man of a new 
moral order. Neither you nor I will be that man. But 
the hope of his coming may sustain us He, too, has 
been touched by fleshly decay. But his wrinkles do not 
humiliate him; his white hair does not tell him that 
it is too late. His eyes are serene and full of memories. 
He has worked at his chosen task without fear of 
penury; he has loved freely and magnificently. . . . 
The voice of one — what a trick of laughing at the dawn 
she had — floats to him . . . the sombre brows and hair 
of another — what splendor was hers of mind and pas- 
sion — arise before him. . . . Yes, beauty is immortal 
and of immortal goodness. . . . He thinks of evenings 
in gardens by a river where over wine, amber or the 
color of dark rose-leaves, he and his friends debated 
of art and the state and the procession of history and 
the nature of the unfathomable world. He thinks of 
his strong children living in the sun. He sits in an 
armchair by the window, a volume of Plato or Goethe 
on his knees. The sun is setting for him now. But 

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UP STREAM 

he is beyond wanting, needing, striving. He has had 
his dawn, his noon, his afternoon. The sun sinks and 
darkness falls npon the open page. If there is life 
beyond earth he is unafraid. If there is none, he is at 
peace. Work, loveliness and wisdom have been his. 
The end is as fit as the beginning; the darkness is as 
beautiful as the dawn. 



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EPILOGUE 

All that I have written is true. It is true of 
America. It is true, in other degrees, of mankind. But 
I have written of America for the simple reason that 
I am an American and I have spoken strongly for the 
equally simple reason that the measure of one's love 
and need is also the measure of one's disappointment 
and indignation. 

The facts stand as I have recorded them. And the 
implications stand. Among the masses of our country- 
men I see no stirring, no desire to penetrate beyond 
fixed names to living things, no awakening from the 
spectral delusions amid which they pursue their aim- 
less business and their sapless pleasures. But the 
critical spirit which is also the creative spirit has 
arisen among us and it has arisen, naturally and in- 
evitably, in the form of a protest and a rebellion 
against the life and the ethos which is also described 
here. I need but name a few representative names: 
Masters, Sherwood Anderson,. Sinclair Lewis. The 
substance of our new literature, of poems and novels 
and books of criticism, is clearly this : Life among us 
Is ugly and mean and, above all things, false in its as- 
sumptions and measures. Somehow we must break 
these shackles and flee and emerge into some beyond 
of sanity, of a closer contact with reality, of nature and 
of truth. 

A few of the books of our new writers are read by 

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many for the story, as a matter of fashion, often quite 
unreflectively. But most of them are read by a 
handful of people only. This handful means little 
among our overwhelming numbers and we who love 
this new literature and are sustained by it are often 
deceived in regard to its significance as either a symp- 
tom or a sanative. Shall I now say, in order to end 
agreeably: It is always darkest before dawn? No; 
for that kind of professional optimism is precisely 
one of our national vices. The hour is dark. But that 
shall not prevent us from working and striving for a 
better one that may come hereafter. 



THEESTD 



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